Let’s Talk About Twitter

Welcome to ye auld personal blog. It’s been a while. 

So a conversation happened on Twitter last night that definitively made up my mind on something I’ve been debating for a while and I wanted to walk through my feelings on the process.

So I’m checking my LinkedIn inbox (my least checked one) at 11:30 at night and run across a request. It’s a request I have received basically monthly this year from different people and I thought it was weird so I made a tweet about it, as it is very anti-millenial in its nature.

Random LinkedIn DM from a student:

“Hey, love your work. I was wondering if we could…

CONNECT ON A PHONE CALL

to discuss career options, etc.”

You guys are generally good kids, but this is crazy talk. It’s like leaving a voice mail – just red flags everywhere.

— Ted Knutson (@mixedknuts) August 5, 2019

And then a follow-up tweet.

It’s hard for busy people to even find time to answer public emails and DMs adequately – a status that many of us feel guilty about, but balance against not even spending enough time answering all of our own employees and friends properly EITHER…

Learn to write lovely letters.

— Ted Knutson (@mixedknuts) August 5, 2019

 

I’m like, ha, that’s kind of funny, people asking for phone calls to connect. Who ever hops on a phone call in the modern generation? And even worse, how the hell would I fit in additional calls in my schedule, especially without missing them, being late, whatever, which would cross my personal threshold for feeling terrible and rude. I try never to be late to anything nor to cancel appointments if I can help it at all, no matter who they are with.

And then the replies started rolling in…

There were a lot more that were angry I was “dunking on” the young person who came to me for advice. Which to me was weird, because there was no specific person I was talking about, it was a general occurrence that kept happening, it was anonymous, and between the two tweets, I thought I made the tradeoffs quite clear.

Hopefully if you read my responses to people last night, you’ll see that I actually feel quite bad about not being able to respond like I used to. But hey, maybe recruiter guy who loves 5-minute phone calls is right and somehow, after all these years of extreme productivity across many jobs, I am actually bad at managing my time effectively.

Yesterday was a Monday. What did I do on Monday?

• 20 minutes To Do List writing.
• 3 hours of inbounds. This includes email, Twitter DMs, LinkedIn. Average of 5 minutes per email. Thoughtful stuff takes longer. Legal documents too. We haaaates them. 
• Slack is its own thing that I do not know how to account for. Sometimes it’s just overhead of watching conversations, other times it’s active productive work.
• 30 minutes Whatsapp
• 6 hours of calls and meetings.
• Out of those calls and meetings, I probably have an hour of my own follow up work.

And that’s just work stuff. Normally I have 30 minutes of school run, 30 minutes of commute time, and whatever basic life maintenance that often includes making food, doing laundry, cleaning dishes, and not working out nearly often enough. 

I also have kids that deserve and need daily attention to live. And a lovely wife whom I would like to stay married to and who has her own insanely busy job and wow I should really find time to have an actual conversation with her more often.

Okay, but that’s Monday. Everyone’s Monday sucks, right? (For the record, my Monday doesn’t suck, it’s just busy.)

Let’s take my last Thursday at work.

• To Do List
• 3-4 hours Inbounds
• 1 Hour Job Interview
• 2 Hours Conference Planning Meeting
• 1 Hour Egypt Weekly Call
• 90 minutes unplanned customer calls or meeting drop-ins (SUPER valuable stuff).
• 30 minutes pre-scheduled task I needed to build into my schedule or I would not get done on deadline.

And this assumes that I am not doing project work or writing strategy docs or any number of other things that I actually do.

A lot of my recent time has gone into testing and feeding back on IQ Tactics. It still needs more. My spare cycles this month will go into designing [REDACTED], which won’t appear until mid-2020. I’m already a month behind where I should be with this, but the summer has been crazy good + busy on the customer end, so I needed to focus there.

I’ve also been spending more and more time learning about startup businesses from some very rich veins of material that I didn’t know existed until recently. This shit is hard. I am dumb. Many clever people have chosen to give me useful information that I would only learn through painful experience otherwise.

I don’t spend enough time learning. I need to do it more. I do generally get just enough thinking time, but that largely comes on commutes and walking my dog. It’s crazy important time for problem solving and design.

And I also need a bit of time for myself to unwind. I do this usually by reading fiction or playing video games.

There is also zero chance – like none whatsoever – I sacrifice sleep to create more time in my day. Less sleep would make me dumber (science!), and end up a drag on every single thing I do. Sleep science is legit. Find time to sleep enough.

Sooooo yeah, I’m actually pretty good at managing my time. In fact, I’m basically maxed out for balancing business, family, and mental health, but sometimes it is worth checking.

Back to The Angry Place…

These three are my employees and they are joking, but there’s a kernel of truth in there too. I should probably be spending more time talking to as many employees as I can. I don’t owe random people on the internet anything, but I owe a lot to my employees, and they are quite frankly the reason the company is successful at all.

So these guys need more time, but I am mostly maxed out. Where can I find the time?

Let’s talk about Twitter…

I’ve been on the platform for around a decade now, and I still think it is amazing, but the tone has changed dramatically over the years. It used to be a fascinating space of collaboration and friendly hangouts. Disagreements were civil, and when we had them, it felt more like academic discourse, especially in the analytics community. Now Twitter in general is a cauldron that’s always near a boil. Everyone seems to treat everyone else as if they are an asshole, at all times.

As occasional behavior, it was acceptable historically. The block button is useful. As default behavior, it’s pretty toxic. I blame the political climate for a lot of this – it’s harder to treat people nicely when everyone is a ball of anxiety at all times, but the larger problem is that seemingly half the online population has given up trying.

(FWIW the analytics community became far more competitive and less collaborative for various reasons, but largely because many of us did end up competing against each other for various jobs, contracts, etc.)

Also, the entitlement people feel about anything regarding my own time or activity is illegitimate and non-existent, even if you think otherwise. It is great that people appreciate my work and the work at StatsBomb. A lot of people bust their asses to make it such, and I have written literally hundreds of free pieces over the years for people to spend time with.

Beyond that the public is entitled to nothing except what I choose to give. If you feel otherwise, kindly fuck off. That is the line between public self and private self and it is one that must exist for people to maintain sanity. Learn to respect it and appreciate it, because it is what enables you to have interactions with even moderately famous people around the world in the first place.

(I am not famous. I know famous people. I don’t know how they do it.)

So if I need to find some time, I can spend less time on The Angry Place (Twitter). Contrary to a lot of people’s use, I actually need Twitter to follow industry news across football and the sports data space, but it doesn’t need to be interactive. And I could certainly use fewer “fuck that guy” moments in my life.

I could also be the problem. Maybe I am communicating badly and failing to convey nuance when I do tweet. Or maybe I just really am an asshole, though the people who interact with me regularly outside of Twitter aren’t really feeding that back to me, so who knows. Communicating badly via tweets means you should still stop tweeting, either way.

So I am going to take a break for the rest of the month, at the very least. My CTO Thom Lawrence tried it recently and said it was glorious. If I want to communicate with the general public, I’ll either write something over here in long form, or publish it on StatsBomb.com. 

And if you want to communicate with me, definitely send an email (ted@statsbomb.com). As noted above, I read literally everything that comes into my various email boxes. This is true even if you never get a response from me, which is almost exclusively because I simply don’t have time. I read everything, evaluate it, question it, and apparently go right back to being arrogant, immodest and egotistical.

Or you didn’t read my pinned tweet where I already answered your question.

–Ted

For those wondering about me personally, my life is really great. Our business has taken off in ways I could only dream about, I love our team, and the projects we are working on are incredibly rewarding intellectually and personally. My family life is also fab, even if it’s insanely busy, and my kids are amazing little people. I feel very, very lucky to be where I am today.