Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Biweeklycast
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Biweeklycast
Biweeklycast episodes
- 36: How Big Things Get Done
Dima and Slava read the book about how big things get done and discuss where they agree and disagree with the author and what they've learned from the book and from talking about it.
- Discombobulation continues: Discombobulated by Eminem
- Dima's struggles with ultra fine Pilot G-2 pens
- How Big Things Get Done
- Challenges with examples for something as multi-faceted as big projects
- Understanding the true goal of the project is critically important for the success of the project
- Ides of "Jobs To Be Done" – check this article
- Dima's classification of projects into "closed" and "open" projects
- Amager Bakke – waste-to-energy power plant which is also an artificial ski slope
- It is all about mindset
1 hr 8 min - 35: Backburner projects
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima contemplates getting work done on projects that are not immediate top priority and Slava points out that there is nothing wrong with pushing, as long as it is done in a considerate way.
- Dima's theme corner
- Difficult inroads into meditation with Headspace
- Free-form theme journaling
- Can projects really be important but not urgent?
- Enshittification of the Internet
- Struggles of leading a second priority project
- Reverse psychology
- "More power too people! But not too much..."
- Bugging people in a considerate way, with care
- Pushing and pulling strategies for moving projects forward
- Frequent releases to keep people engaged
Next episode: book club discussion of "How Big Things Get Done"
54 min - 34: Ideal Weeks
Slava wonders about planning ideal weeks and quizzes Dima about his approaches to balancing long-term and short-term and dealing with the unplanned.
- Discombobulation continues
- Slava's theme corner
- Some Bullet Journal videos
- Minimal Bullet Journal Setup
- Simple 2024 Bullet Journal Setup
- Some articles from the Internet about ideal weeks
- How designing your ideal week can increase your productivity (and sanity)
- How to Better Control Your Time by Designing Your Ideal Week
- Planning your ideal week
- Is something like "ideal" an acceptable terminology
- Planning for productive weeks
- Dealing with unplanned tasks and interruptions
- Weaving long-term thinking into short-term planning
- Meetings and no meetings days
- Detailed calendar planning: does it work?
- Planning multi-step activities for time efficiency
1 hr 7 min - 33: Themes 2024
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
In the last episode recorded in 2023 Dima and Slava discuss their yearly themes and talk talk what is in cards for them in 2024.
- Biweekly #9: Themes. 2023 Edition
- The Theme System
- Your Theme by CGP Grey
- Looking back at 2023 themes and laying out themes for 2024
- Themes and journaling
- Seasonal and monthly themes
- Resting meaningfully and intentionally
- Visual reminders for themes
1 hr 3 min - 32: We Are Bob
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube
In this unusual book club episode Dima and Slava depart from their usual business literature repertoire and discuss sci-fi novel "We Are Legion (We Are Bob)".
- Follow up
- Dima is fascinated with the word "discombobulated"
- Challenges of taking notes while on the run
- "We Are Legion (We Are Bob)" on GoodReads
- Challenges of human replication, artificial intelligence, self-identification
- Slava read all the books set in the Bobiverse and Dima tries to goes where the author takes the story
- "Fuzzy Nation" by John Scalzi on GoodReads
50 min - 31: Zettelkasten Method
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube
Dima describes his adventures into Zettelkasten and together with Slava they discuss ins and outs of note taking.
- Follow-up
- Rely on team to solve teamwork challenges
- Zettelkasten Method
- Niklas Luhmann published over 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles on variety of subjects
- Videos about Zettelkasten, Obsidian, and smart notes
- Zettelkasten Obsidian Workflow
- How to take smart notes
- Slava uses Sidekick Notepad
- Note taking software
- Logseq
- Obsidian
- Notion
- Book How to Take Smart Notes
- Atomic note – a note that represents exactly one idea
- Literature and fleeting notes
- Biweekly 28: No Rules Rules
- Power of Zettelkasten is in connecting the notes
- Can the time invested into organization of the notes really pay off?
- What do organization of photos and notes have in common?
1 hr 6 min - 30: Co-creation
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube
Slava talks about the experience he had facilitating co-creation of L&D course and together with Dima they brainstorm ideas for overcoming challenges Slava encountered.
- Dima once again tried to pronounce "Birmingham" correctly
- Baader-Meinhof corner: word "illustrious"
- L&D Mastery course
- Collective creativity
- Points series of events was creative
- 3 ways a problem and a team shape one another
- Assemble a team and let it find the best problem to solve
- Define a problem and then put together the best team that can solve
- Something in between
- Slava's MMFD to driving co-creation in a diverse team
- Motivation
- Meetings
- Freedom
- Deadlines
- Dima's thought pitfalls to avoid
- Do not stick to original plan (or idea) to religiously
- When evolution of the project runs into a dead end, don't be afraid to take a step or two back
- Mistakes Slava made in the process
- Over-managing the meetings not giving enough room to meaningful discussions
- Not creating convenient space for collaboration
- Lack of regular 1:1s
- Allow the team to self-organize!
- How to get the team to engage and care about the whole project
- Tuckman's stages of group development: forming–storming–norming–performing
- Developers, developers, developers!
- How to keep interest in the project going after the initial boost of enthusiasm?
- Next project: centralized or de-centralized?
1 hr 7 min - 29: Unleashing The Power
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube
Dima and Slava sit with Viktoria Pysarenko to talk about Vita's experience of attending a transformative experience by Tony Robbins, general idea of such motivational events, and the lessons they teach us.
- Vita's Instagram
- What is Unleash the Power Within?
- Is this a training? Is this an even? Is this a "happening"?
- If Tony Robbins is a coach, how does coaching work with 12,000 people
- Physical activities to get the body and the mind in the desired state
- Effect of the crowd in the experience
- What people come for knowledge or emotional boost?
- The idea of communal experiences
- Things in common between Tony Robbins trainings, big concerts, and going to stadium for a football game
- David A. Sinclair, who researches aging
- Is it worth to attend such a training online?
1 hr 7 min - 28: No Rules Rules
Dima and Slava have read the "No Rules Rules" – a book about Netflix's culture of innovation – and now they discuss how and if it can be used to transplant that culture into another organization.
- No Rules Rules. Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
- Biweeklycast #16: Culture Map
- All of Biweekly bookclub episodes
- Increasing talent density is a very sound idea
- Miracle – a 2004 movie about coach Herb Brooks who brought US ice hockey team to winning the 1980 Winter Olympics
- Another name for "constructive" feedback: "developmental"
- AAAA model of providing feedback
- Aim to assist
- Actionable
- Appreciate
- Accept or discard
- Why so much attention to no policy on vacation and no specific policy on expenses?
- Delegation of decisions to informed captains
- Does paying at the top of personal market only really work for "stable" markets?
- It is not all that straightforward with 10x developers
- Transparency can be a powerful tool for building a company culture
- Everything is a tradeoff. Including the keeper test
- Netflix essentially replaced very specific braindead rules with more generic rules that require thinking
- Slava loved the idea of live feedback
- Different people, for instance Dima and Slava, have different ideas about what 360 feedback is. Check Wikipedia
- Is it a book about managerial culture rather than a company culture?
- What are the tools to lead with context?
- Points
1 hr 17 min - 27: Transparency
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube
Dima and Slava set out to discuss transparency as a potential solution to different challenges, but spend most of the time talking about compensation transparency and its challenges and benefits.
- Follow-up: do managers overdo it out of desire for everything to go smoothly?
- Focused #185: How to Be Miserable
- Compensation transparency – disclosure of employee compensation amounts, either among other employees in an organization, to owners, to government regulators, or to the public (Wikipedia)
- Some articles from HBR on the topic transparency
- Research: The Complicated Effects of Pay Transparency
- Research: The Unintended Consequences of Pay Transparency
- When Transparency Backfires, and How to Prevent It
- Transitioning to transparency can be risky that starting point is messy
- Transparency on salaries and ranges would be incomplete without transparency on rules for promotions, etc
- How does transparency benefit companies?
- Is complete transparency even possible?
- How to deal with misuse of information disclosed in pursuit of transparency?
- Transparency vs brutal honesty
- Biweeklycast #13 Automating The State
- Next episode: book club discussion of No Rules Rules
1 hr
About Biweeklycast
From the publisher's feed
Friendly discussions about life, business, engineering, and learning between Dima Malenko and Slava Rudnytskyi.