“Successful leaders see the opportunities in every difficulty rather than the difficulty in every opportunity.” Reed Markham
Quote
Reply
Because it’s Friday: The Doctor Who Story
“It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.” Aristotle
Quote
“Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.” Robert Louis Stevenson
Quote
Back online now
Multitasking – a Simulation
There’s a popular misconception that multi-tasking is a good thing. 
There’s even one that asserts that women are better at it than men.
Henrik Kniberg has a great simulation to show how multitasking is a not a good idea, it’s called The Multitasking Name Game.
I’m not going to say any more – download the PDF describing how it works, have a read and try it out on your team.
Because it’s Friday: Optical Illusions
What we see isn’t always what we see, that’s the great thing about optical illusions:
That’s a bit strange?
(This is a real life illusion which consists of a picture and a large mirror)
Parallel?
Waving?
Rotating?
3D?
Distance?
Circle or square?
Length?
Flat?
How many black dots?
More parallel?
Rotating?
How many legs?
Is that possible?
How many yellow dots?
Stationary or rotating?
More moving objects?
Don’t get sucked in
Nice curtains?
Spiral?
How many legs this time?
My Tools: CrashPlan
Like many families the Chastney’s are producing data at a formidable rate. I have a son who edits music and a daughter who is into photography, add to that a reasonably sized music collection, my photographs and a bucket load of other documents and there’s over 150GB of important stuff. (Did I tell you about the days when we used to argue about people wanting 20MB hard disks (yes I did mean Mega Bytes)).
That’s where CrashPlan comes in by creating a safe remote continuous backup.
Getting all of this data copied to a location away from the house has always been an aim for a number of reasons. The main reason being that there are so many situations where a backup solution in the house wouldn’t be sufficient to protect it – fire, flood, etc.. There’s also the added advantage of being able to access data that you haven’t taken with you if you need to. CrashPlan Central provides a remote backup location that is always there to write to and to read from.
Another great thing about CrashPlan is that it doesn’t matter where the devices are. My son is at university and living away from home during term time. Because he has internet access all of his work is still backed-up and protected whether he’s at home or at university.
The CrashPlan agent runs all of the time on all of the devices and is continuously backing up the data. This means that we don’t really think about it making a backup it just happens.
We’ve had need to recover some files too and that works a treat also.
There are a number of other features of CrashPlan that are really good, but I don’t really use them.
The pricing is pretty good to. I use the CrashPlan+ Unlimited Family which covers the household for a few pounds a month.
Turn off your smart-phone: Reduce stress
I’ve believed for some time that many of us are causing ourselves harm by the way we are constantly connected, and also constantly working.
A new report by The British Psychological Society says that we need to be turning off our smart phones to reduce our stress:
The study established the existence of a helpful-stressful cycle; it found that a device is typically acquired to help an individual manage their work load. However, once the individual starts to use their smart phone the work load management benefits are displaced by the pressure to keep abreast with their new expanded virtual social life. The more an individual becomes stressed and worried the more compulsive behaviours such as checking will occur.
Richard Balding advises organisations to consider this problem seriously:
“Smart phone use is increasing at a rapid rate and we are likely to see an associated increase in stress from social networking. Organisations will not flourish if their employees are stressed, irrespective of the source of stress, so it is in their interest to encourage their employees to switch their phones off; cut the number of work emails sent out of hours, reduce people’s temptation to check their devices.”
Back in 2009 I wrote about My New Fear of Working from Home which highlighted a similar cycle.
My smartish-phone is set to turn itself off in the evening and I try my best to leave it that way.
Via Lifehacker
My Tools: Evernote
The simplest way to describe Evernote is to call it a note taking and organisation tool, but that’s selling it a bit short.
Note taking and collecting is incredibly important to the job that I do, and if that was all it did it would still be very important.
I used to carry around all sorts of piles of paper. These comprised things I was reading, things I should be reading, thoughts, scribbles, diagrams, etc.. I still carry around a moleskin notepad which I use for taking notes in meetings, but for all of the other notes there’s Evernote.
My job involves me working with all sorts of pieces of information. Sometimes I need to read it, at other times I just need to know where it is for future reference. All of it goes into Evernote where it’s classified and organised.
One of the great things about Evernote is that it has been built from the ground as an internet application. It has client applications for all sorts of platforms, but these all replicate information with the central service.
I’ve also introduced it to my son who is studying at University and it works well for him too, quite frankly I’m a bit surprised that it isn’t promoted more by educational establishments
I’m not going to say much more because I really need to write a post about the ways that I process information and the way in which I use a number of different tools to collect, filter and organise. Evernote is a big part of that, but it’s only part of the journey.