It’s getting a bit long in the tooth now, but I still really like this video:
";” alt=””>
I’ve been in situations similar to this on way too may occasions.
There are times in life when we can see our life clearly, at other times we need someone to remind us of the reality of a situation.
Nigel Marsh’s TED talk on the subject was for me a great reality check.
Some quotes that struck me:
Certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being being meaningfully engaged on a day to day basis with a young family.
There are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet desperation.
Governments and corporations aren’t going to solve this issue for us.
If you don’t design your life someone else will and you might not like their idea of balance.
We need to avoid the trap of “I’ll have a life when I retire”.
Nigel is passionate about his subject and rightly so – it’s a significant issue for our society.
One of the challenges I find as I get older is how I continue to be open to new ways of doing things.
The world of work is consistently changing and in order to stay valuable we need to change with it. An example of this has recently become evident to me. I used to do a job that was very valuable within the business, I can now see a situation where the business no longer requires people with that role. It’s not just that the role is being diminished – it’s no longer needed at all.
If I’d stayed doing what I was doing I would now be feeling very sensitive about my position going forward.
Here are the things that I do to stay open to change:
Really interesting TED talk today from Barry Schwarz on Practical Wisdom.
";” alt=””>
One of the challenges of being a reasonably early adopter of things is that it take a while for people to catch-up.
It take some people even longer than others.
And then there is another group who are even further behind.
If I want to communicate with all of the groups I need to span all of the tracks.
Perhaps, one day, we’ll be able to turn some of the tracks off, but I don’t see much evidence of it.
And, I’m not just talking about my personal life, the same is true at my employer. Actually, as I think about it, it’s even worse amongst my colleagues.
We have all sorts of ways to communicate these days. One of the things I’ve noticed with the newer communication mechanisms is that they drive us to a level of informality.
Within the formal communication mechanisms we have built in ways of providing feedback, even if it was just a simple salutation at the start or the end of a letter.
With informal mechanisms we need to be careful to think about the feedback that we give. There are a number of times when I’ve read through twitter conversations where it would be easy to assume that the individuals are in violent and personal disagreement, when the reality was far different.
We need to think about the feedback that we give:
http://onefte.com/comics/2011-04-05-no-news-is-good-news-right.png
I’ve recently been given a new work laptop.
The old one was a bit processor constrained and a lot memory constrained. I didn’t think that it was having much impact on my productivity. Working with the new laptop has shown me that I was wrong.
It got me to thinking – “I wonder how much more of my life contains significant productivity constraints that I don’t think are significant?”
Increasing productivity is always much better than working longer or harder.
Once upon a time people in the UK would stay up late to watch Open University programmes shown after the normal schedule of programmes.
Alternatively you’d buy an expensive set of videos from a professional training outfit.
You might even go to a training seminar. If you wanted to hear someone really special you’d almost certainly have to travel. This seminar would cost you.
Today, there is a huge wealth of video learning available for free. Some of the most brilliant thinkers are available at the click of a few buttons.
Today I’ve been reminded of the wonders of this while watching a number of videos.
This was today’s selection:
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
Neil Pasricha talking about the Three ‘A’s of Awesome. Some great thoughts about how to look at life and go after the things that are genuinely you.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
A great set of science experiments from Charles Limb. What is it that happens in our brain when we are improvising?
http://positivesharing.23video.com/v.swf
Alexander Kjerulf encouraging us to think about the positives at work in the 4 minute video.
Oh, and I nearly forgot I also watched a really interesting video from Microsoft Research on MirageBlocks which looks like a really interesting way to think about the convergence of the physical and the virtual.
As part of my return to online life after my decontamination over the holidays I went through my Facebook wall and marked anything and everyone I wasn’t really interested in and clicked: “Hide all posts by…”
This had the effect of significantly reducing the number of updates on my wall. It also had a more significant impact – it removed much of the interest too.
I’m not talking about real interest.
I’m talking about the interest I give to all of those times I’ve found myself looking at photos of someone I vaguely know with their dog, cat, budgie, etc.
I’m talking about the interest I give to all of those petty conversations between people who should really be excluded from using a keyboard by virtue of the way in which they waste everyone else’s time.
I’m talking about all of the interest I show to status update messages from the applications that people are using because they don’t have anything better to do.
In short – I lost interest because I significantly reduced the “variable interval reinforcement schedule” of Facebook.
Try it someday you might actually enjoy it.
I was reminded this morning of a study from 2009 that tried to assess the productivity impact of Facebook.
It’s conclusion was this:
Nearly half of office employees access Facebook during work. Nucleus found companies effectively lose an average of 1.5 percent of total office productivity when employees can access Facebook during the work day.
I’ve heard this 1.5% impact repeated a number of times since that time even though it’s nor nearly 2 years old and a lot of things have changed since then. I’ve also heard the same statistic apply to social network sites in general and that’s definitely a stretch of the research.
If you look into the details of the research it’s done on the basis of interviewing 237 office workers and for 2009 is, in many ways, revealing an opinion for the time which still lives on today. That opinion being – while people are on Facebook they aren’t doing the work that they should, and would be doing.
My personal view is that it’s not that simple.
The first point to acknowledge is that I think for a number of people Facebook, and many other web sites for that matter, is a problem. It’s attention grabbing, it’s interesting, it’s a whole set of things that mean that it will be a productivity drain if we let it.
But my second, and more significant point, is that it’s very simplistic to assume that people are “productive” between 9:00 and 17:00 in the office location.
For starters, I don’t know many people who simply work from 9-to-5 these days, travel and collaboration requirements make this impossible for many people.
Then there’s the assumption that people are machines and are “productive” all of the time. They’re not, nor is it healthy for them to try to be. We provide facilities in offices because they are needed by the people who work there. But beyond that there are all sorts of times that could be measured as “unproductive”, but are actually times when it would be more accurate for them to be classed as “undefined productivity”. Most meetings, phone calls, coffee machine conversations, office chats could all be classed this way. it’s not clear what is being achieved in clear, unambiguous productivity terms – but they are all a necessary part of office life.
There are also a set of external distractions and activities that people already undertake during the working day. It would be interesting to know whether people who have access to Facebook have more, or less, distractions overall. I suspect it’s higher overall, but I would also expect there to be some level of offset.
Finally there’s the biggest productivity impact of all – morale. it would be interesting to know whether people feel a higher level of morale in companies that trust their staff to manage their time. I’m not sure whether lack of Facebook access would have an impact on my morale, but I do know that corporate blocking rules can have a negative impact overall. That’s not to say that corporate blocking rules are wrong, just that they have an impact.
To conclude, I don’t think that turning off access to Facebook in a corporate environment will get you a 1.5% productivity increase there are a lot of other factors to consider.
I find that I am very influenced by the music that I listen to as I work. Sometimes it’s a bit of a distraction, but most of the time it helps me to focus and concentrate.I even have a special set of music that I almost exclusively listen to while I’m working.
This music is primarily classical in nature, and definitely instrumental.
I’ve acquired this music at my own expense in order to be more productive.
It’s not the only thing I’ve acquired to add to my working life better. I’m sure, as I look around the office, is that it’s a growing trend.
I wonder how many employers really recognise this as a good thing?
While in a meeting with some friends at the weekend we filled out a survey. It was one of those where you answer a set of questions by giving it a score (1 to 5), you then have to add up all of the scores a divide them by the number questions. This survey was in sets of 5 questions.
I filled in a the questionnaire, summed and divided. After a little while another person at the table, who was clearly struggling a bit with the maths said “oooh get you, working it out to the decimal place”.
It took me a little while to realise what was happening. They were struggling with their remainders, but I didn’t have any remainders, why? Because I was using a short-cut.
I was simply taking the sum of the answers, doubling them and then putting the decimal point in the right place – 17 divided by 5 is easy this way, it’s just 17 times 2 = 34 divided by 10 = 3.4.
That got me thinking about shortcuts in general.
We have shortcuts all over the place; keyboard shortcuts, maths shortcuts, we even have acronyms which are shortcuts in speech.
Calling them short-cuts suggest that in some way they aren’t normal. If you know a shortcut from Preston to Ribchester you’ve not going to go the normal way,
Why isn’t the shortcut the norm though?
Why would anyone divide 17 by 5 without using the shortcut?
Why would anyone cut and paste on a computer without the keyboard shortcut?
Why do we even teach people how to do things without the shortcut?
If it really is a shortcut then surely it’s the best way of doing it? Why bother learning how to go the long way around?
Graham Chastney 
