Your best work(space)

Doing your best work requires placing yourself in the right environment. For me, I need to be in an uncluttered space, free from major distractions, yet close enough to interactions to avoid prolonged isolation. I also believe in surrounding yourself with the energetic and inspired people, if you can afford such a luxury.

The model workspace

My wife an I are re-doing our office at home. Currently mulling over design ideas, but websites and catalogs only take me so far. I find they fall short of giving me the actual look and feel of a future space. To cope, I have built a model using SketchUp, catering to my geeky need for spatial visualization. It took me 35 minutes to build the framework using SketchUp: the walls, doors and closets and windows. Now, it's taking us much longer to design and build the workspace inside it. I was under the impression that, just as in geoscience, we need models for making detailed descisions. But perhaps, this model is complicating or delaying us getting started. Or maybe we are just being picky. Refined tastes.

This is a completely to-scale drafting of my new office. It is missing some furniture, but the main workspace is shown on the left wall; a large, expansive desk to house (up to) two monitors, two chairs, and two laptops. The wide window sill will be fitted with bench cushions for reading. Since we want a built-in look, it makes sense construct a digital model to see how the components line up with other features in the space. 

More than one place to work 

So much of what we do in geoscience is centered around effectively displaying information, so it helps to feel fresh and inspired by the environment beyond the desktop. Where we work affects how we work. Matt and I have that luxury of defining our professional spaces, and we are flexible and portable enough to work in a number of settings. I like this.

There is a second place to go to when I want to get out of the confines of my condo. I spend about 30 hours a month at a co-working space downtown. The change in scenery is invigorating. I can breathe the same air as like-minded entrepreneurs, freelancers, and sprouters of companies. I can plug into large monitors, duck into a private room for a conference call, hold a meeting, or collaborate with others. Part of what makes an office is the technology, the furniture, the lighting, which is important. The other part of a workspace is your relationship and interaction to other people and places; a sense of community.

What does your best work space look like? Are you working there now?

What technology?

This is my first contribution to the Accretionary Wedge geology themed community blog. Charles Carrigan over at Earth-like Planet is hosting this months topic where he posts the question, "how do you perceive technology impacting the work that you do?" My perception of technology has matured, and will likely continue to change, but here are a few ways in which technology works for us at Agile. 

My superpower

I was at a session in December where one of the activities was to come up with one (and only one) defining superpower. A comic-bookification of my identity. What is the thing that defines you? The thing that you are or will be known for? It was an awkward experience for most, a bold introspection to quickly pull out a memorable, but not too cheesy, superpower that fit our life. I contemplated my superhuman intelligence, and freakish strength... too immodest. The right choice was invisibility. That's my superpower. Transparency, WYSIWYG, nakedness, openness. And I realize now that my superpower is, not coincidentally, aligned with Agile's approach to technology. 

For some, technology is the conspicuous interface between us and our work. But conspicuous technology constrains your work, ordains it even. The real challenge is to use technology in a way that makes it invisible. Matt reminds me that how I did it isn't as important as what I did. Making the technology seem invisible means the user must be invisible as well. Ultimately, tools don't matter—they should slip away into the whitespace. Successful technology implementation is camouflaged. 

I is for iterate

Technology is not a source of ideas or insights, such as you'd find in the mind of an experienced explorationist or in a detailed cross-section or map. I'm sure you could draw a better map by hand. Technology is only a vehicle that can deliver the mind's inner constructs; it's not a replacement for vision or wisdom. Language or vocabulary has nothing to do with it. Technology is the enabler of iteration. 

So why don't we iterate more in our scientific work? Because it takes too long? Maybe that's true for a hand-drawn contour map, but technology is reducing the burden of iteration. Because we have never been taught humility? Maybe that stems from the way we learned to learn: homework assignments have exact solutions (and are done only once), and re-writing an exam is unheard of (unless you flunked it the first time around).

What about writing an exam twice to demonstrate mastery? What about reading a book twice, in two different ways? Once passively in your head, and once actively—at a slower pace, taking notes. I believe the more ways you can interact with your media, data, or content, the better work will be done. Students assume that the cost required to iterate outweighs the benefits, but that is no longer the case with digital workflows. Embracing technology's capacity to iterate seemlessly and reliably is what a makes a grand impact in our work.

What do we use?

Agile strives to be open as a matter of principle, so when it comes to software we go for open source by default. Matt wrote recently about the applications and workstations that we use. 

Two hundred posts

The petrophysics cheasheet was one of our most popular posts

My post on Tuesday was the two hundredth post on our blog, which we started 19 months ago in November 2010. Though we began with about 15 posts per month, we have settled down to a rate of 7 or 8 posts per month, which feels sustainable. At this rate, it will be at least a year before we hit 300.

We hit 100 posts on 21 June last year, after only 222 days. In the 358 days since then we've had about 41 700 visits from 24 500 people in 152 countries. The most popular content is a little hard to gauge because of the way we run every post over the home page for a couple of weeks, but from the most recent 100 posts, the favourites are (in descending pageview order):

• G is for Gather (6 comments)
• Petrophysics cheatsheet (5)
• Why petrophysics is hard (5)
• I is for Integrated trace (7)
• Are you a poet or a mathematician? (13)
• Pseudogeophysics (8)
• Wherefore art thou, Expert? (12)
• Geophysical stamps 3: Geophone (10)
• The Agile toolbox (11)
• Stop waiting for permission to knock someone's socks off (10)

Someone asked recently how long our posts take to write. It varies quite a bit, especially if there are drawings or other graphics, but I think the average is about 4 hours, perhaps a little more. Posts follow an idea–draft–hack–review–publish process, and this might be months long: we currently have 52 draft posts in the pipeline! Some may never make it out...

We'd love to have some other voices on the site, so if you feel strongly about something in this field, or would like the right to reply to one of our opinion pieces, please get in touch. Or start a blog!

One hundred posts

Yesterday Evan posted the 100th article on the blog. Not all of them have been technical, though most are. A few were special cases, hosting the popular Where on (Google) Earth game for example. But most have been filled with geoscience goodness... at least we think so. We hope you do too.

One hundred posts isn't exactly earth-shattering, but we're proud of our work and thought we'd share some some of our greatest hits. We have our favourites, naturally. I really liked writing What is unconventional, and thought it was quite original. And I love yesterday's post, which is Evan's favourite too.

We could look at the most commented (not counting WOGEs, which always get lots of comments). The most comments were garnered by Why we should embrace openness, which got eight, and only two of those were from Evan and I. Every comment gives us warm, fuzzy feelings and it's really why we do this: a big Thank You to all our commenters, especially the serial scribes j, Richie B, Reid, Brian, and Tooney—you are awesome. Basic cheatsheet got nine comments, but four of them were from us: we do try to respond to every comment. 

It's a little harder to tell which article is the most read. There's a bias through time, since older pages have been up longer. And the front page gets most of the traffic, and each article gets a spell as the top story, but we don't track which articles are up when that page is visited. 

The most visited page is Evan's brilliant Rock physics cheatsheet; the PDF is also the most downloaded file. This is good because Evan poured his heart into building that thing. The next most popular page is The scales of geoscience, which benefitted hugely from being tagged in the social bookmarking site reddit. 

We love writing this blog, and plan to grow it even more over the coming months. If this is your first time, welcome! Otherwise, thank you for your support and attention. There's a lot to read on the 'net, and we're thrilled you chose this.

Measuring value

Often in upstream oil and gas we are challenged with a simple question: what's the value? What's the value of that 3D seismic? What's the NPV of this study? How does your professional network affect our bottom line?

Sometimes, at least for me, the first reaction is indignation. Let's take the seismic example; it goes like this:

Finance guy - So, this $28M... 3D seismic. What's the value of this data set?
Geoscientist - What's the value? Of that 3D? That state-of-the-art, high-fold, wide-azimuth, long-offset, high-bandwidth, eco-friendly, ultra-safe 3D seismic survey I just spent four months designing and soliciting bids on?
Finance guy - Yeah
Geoscientist - We have four wells on twenty square kilometres of land. We want to drill forty more. The wells cost $10M each. The seismic will allow us to pick the best locations. It's 3D seismic, the best quality. We always do it. Everyone does it. We can't do subsurface science without it, not very well anyway.
Finance guy - Yeah... Sorry, what's the value of the seismic? Dollars will do.

Finance guy just wants a number. The value is clear to everyone involved. But maybe money is tight this year and finance would like to defer some costs to next year. Maybe we can lower the cost by making the survey smaller, or reducing the fold. Before too long someone utters the unspeakable: 'Value of Information'. The next month of your life becomes a frustrating spreadsheet nightmare of trying to get the process to yield the answer your team wants so you can get on with finding oil and gas.

I think there is a better way. What do you think?