1. Work with people you like and respect who think much like you do. Disagreements are okay and can be productive, but I've had a better time working with people where we largely agree on the basics.
2. At the end of each day, write the people who gave you more time than usual that day and helped you as a result, and thank them for it. It's a small thing, but it signals the right thing about other people's time and yours. Time is valuable and you should pay for it with respect and gratitude.
3. Follow this advice. Go find people in your company you think are awesome and ask them, "How can I help you?" Focus on the happiness of people around you and you will be happier than if you focus on your own happiness. Be very generous with your time for the people you like.
4. Be willing to ask anyone for help, respectfully. Make a short, clear, reasonable request and send it to anyone on the Internet who might be able to directly help you. Many of them will say no or not respond, but a surprising number will say yes.
5. Learn how to say "no" and say it a lot. Be respectful, be considerate. But say no to things that are going to make it harder for you to do your job or lead your life.
6. Wait until you know what needs doing, then do it all the way, right away. Don't dilly-dally and don't be wishy-washy.
7. If you are a leader, listen closely for ideas from the people you work with, and shine a bright light on the best ideas. Give people a chance, give them your authority, give them a problem to solve and the power to solve it. Let them step up and surprise you. If you are not yet a leader, offer your ideas freely and often, and don't be discouraged if you hear 'no' a lot. Push for what you think is right and when given a shot to make it right, make the most of that shot.
8. Lead a full and happy life outside of work, and never neglect it. You will be happier at work if you are happier in life. Go do that most of all.

I live in lower Manhattan, so since Thursday I've been consumed with Hurricane Irene and what the best way to deal with it might be. A lot has already been written on this, so I'm going to confine my thoughts to the geek's-eye view of the weekend.

• The single most important tool that helped New Yorkers make plans this weekend was the evacuation zone map and online map search tool, posted by the Mayor's office on Thursday. This bucketed all of New York City into four regions: Zones A, B, and C, and "No Zone" areas that were unlikely to have severe effects. I'd love to see the NY Times or someone assess the map's eventual accuracy, but in a sense it doesn't matter, since I fully believe it was the best information available at the time. Knowing your Zone meant you had a sense of direction. Zone A was under a mandatory evacuation order. I live in Zone B, but because I live in a basement apartment near a river, I made the decision to evacuate to a No Zone area (my friend Sarah's apartment in Brooklyn). The New York City Mayor's office and OEM deserve HUGE thanks for making this information available as early and as clearly as they did. Other city governments should use this as a model in similar situations. Maps save lives.
• For me, the second most important tool was Twitter. Kathryn Yu noted that Twitter makes it easy to have tweets for particular accounts sent to your phone as SMS messages, and setting that up for @NYCMayorsOffice meant I could immediately have the most critical information we needed, possibly even if power, internet, and cell services all went down (since SMS tends to be more hardy than any of those). Twitter posts quickly spread information and reacted against false information. I kept my family and friends informed about what was going on by telling them to follow me on Twitter. I got local reports from people who had stayed near the area I'd evacuated, which helped me be less stressed out about the state of my apartment. This sounds like an ad for Twitter, and I do have friends who work there, but I can say without bias that Twitter was invaluable.
• While it is a UI and community management disaster area, Wunderground, the weather geek's site, provided a lot of information and analysis that an overconfident "if I just have the right data" geek (ahem) could use to make decisions about the weather forecasts. In case this isn't already obvious, journalism as an industry does not provide useful planning information about impending disasters. It's a short distance from "if it bleeds, it leads" to the conclusion that fear sells papers and boosts ratings, and every professional journalistic source I tried to use either overhyped or reacted against overhyping, both of which are useless. Wunderground isn't in that industry and isn't reacting against it (they certainly make fun of The Weather Channel and CNN coverage, but as outsiders, and choose their own path instead). The site was basically a constant stream of comment posts from all kinds of sources – everyone from scientists to victims of the storm to straight-up internet trolls. In my experience it most closely resembled a stock discussion forum, with "barometric pressure" substituting for "P/E ratio" and so on. But, I'm used to that kind of community, it was easy for me to spot the trolls (I think), and the people who got a lot of positive feedback on their comments often turned out to be right. Wunderground did a good job of both raising concerns early, and then reasonably tempering concerns as the storm progressed; professional journalism, as an industry generalization, did exactly the opposite.
• Because we had enough warning of what might come, Amazon was useful. While UPS made yeoman efforts to be useful too, for me they weren't, while for others they got the job done. As news about Irene started to build, I took out my emergency kit and go bag and assessed what was missing; early Thursday I placed an overnight order to fill the gaps. Amazon shipped all but one of the items on time, but unfortunately UPS delivered them late at night on Friday, after I'd already evacuated. (I'm impressed they got the package to me at all, though, considering what was going on.) Mike O'Dea, on the other hand, ordered a portable generator and a bunch of MREs via Amazon Prime, and got them in time on Friday. If you have enough warning and can wait out a late delivery, a well-timed Amazon orde