Category: Productivity

How to design a meeting

Daniel W. Rasmus has started an interesting series of blog posts on the design of meetings, or more specifically, the design of meetings that use collaborative software. He introduces his first post in a series with these words:

Welsh WatersHow to Design a Meeting: Lesson 1

We all run meetings like we know what we’re doing. We have been to so many meetings we just know how to run them. What we really know is how to model and perpetuate the poor habits and practices of our mentors and coaches, managers and colleagues.  In the era of collaboration software our meetings need to be redesigned so they are driven through the collaboration environment in real-time, as the meeting takes place. Stop all the e-mails and document duplications, or even worse, handouts and get people to engage in a collaborative way through a meeting environment that captures all of the content, the tasks and the decisions in one view (not necessarily, as you will read, in one place).

The other day I finished work exhausted. As I sat and considered what I had achieved that day I realised that I had spent most of it in meetings, but what had I achieved? Honestly, precious little. Why was that? Well, and this is where I might be getting a bit too personal for some, boredom tires me out, and I’d spent much of the day bored.

I’m not saying that meetings are boring, but I am suggesting that many of the meetings that I attend are boring. Sometimes meetings need to happen that are in their very make-up dull, the context and the subject makes it difficult to make them interesting. These are the minority of meetings though, many meetings with interesting content are made colourless by the way that we run them. We spend so much of our time in meetings we should care that they are effective. If a meeting is effective it, at least, has a chance of not being boring.

I need to hold my hands up here and apologise for the drab meetings that I’ve run too, there’s a lot I need to learn, relearn and unlearn. Daniel has provided an infographic of where he is going with the series, I’ll read with interest:

Multitasking Infographic

I don’t think that there’s anything startlingly new in this graphic, but it’s good to see them all together:

Via Mashable.

My changing workplace – part 5: Client-server 90's

As computers became steadily more connected across the 90’s new forms of applications started to emerge. In the 80’s applications ran on one computer with people accessing them from a terminal. This was fine for the simple text applications that we were used to running, but a new way of doing things was already becoming the normal way of doing things – the graphical user interface. It became known as the GUI which I personally pronounce something similar to gooey.

The emergence of the GUI and increasing compute power in the clients led to a realisation that it was perhaps better to do some work on the client device and other work on the server supporting it. This became known as client-server with each application having its own client and its own server.

My first experience of a graphical client-server application was Lotus Notes I think. We’d done some work with cc:Mail before it was purchased by Lotus, but it wasn’t really client server because there wasn’t any cc:Mail running on the server, all of the work was done by the client. All that you needed for cc:Mail to work was a shared file area that each of the clients wrote to and read from. Lotus Notes was different because it had a server that the client talked to. I don’t think we did too much with it prior to version 3, and even then, it wasn’t the dominant email client that people used in the organisation. We also did some playing around with Microsoft Mail and eventually early versions of Microsoft Exchange. The organisation I worked for, and later supported (after being outsourced), had a number of divisions and each division had its own opinion about email so ran its own systems. Each of these systems talked to the other via the x.400 protocol and we exchanged directory information using x.500. At some point the division I was supporting chose to consolidate its systems into a divisional Lotus Notes system as did some other division, other divisions chose Microsoft Exchange then at version 5.5 and still quite limited (the database on a server was limited, practically to 100GB and you could only have one database).

At one point I did some pretty basic Lotus Notes database development. We had a paper based ordering system for IT equipment and wanted to get away from all of the writing, so I was tasked with creating a database with the forms in it. We still printed the forms out and sent them off for approval and processing, but at least the creation of the order was done electronically. It was a great idea and the database lived on long after I’d stopped supporting it (it was given to a more professional development team to look after). Like many organisations the deployment of Lotus Notes lead to an explosion of databases for different tasks, everything from a lending database to numerous discussion databases, from document library stores to customer relationship lists.

Lotus Notes was only one of many applications built in this client-server architecture. We thought that this was the way that applications were going to be written for the foreseeable future but a new way of displaying information was already being used and a new way of finding information was about to be launched. I can’t be confident that I used Google in the 90’s, but certainly by the early 00’s ‘to Google’ was something that had become second nature. Before Google though, there had already been Yahoo and a number of other ways of searching the growing catalogue of information on the Internet. The Internet was now the place to find information (text and pictures) but little did we perceive that this would become the default way of providing any and every capability. Although you could argue that the browser is itself client-server in architecture the difference comes from the browser being the universal client for all sorts of applications. It took until the late 90’s for Microsoft to realise this and it wasn’t until the successive releases of Internet Explorer 5.0 (1999) and 6.0 (2001) that they built a (not to healthy as it turned out) dominant position.

In the early 1990’s we were still in a world were every device was built to support the person using it and that person could do whatever they liked on it. If we wanted to upgrade a client-server application we had plan an upgrade to the server and all of the clients. There was very little commonality between them and every device required local support. We knew how much it cost us to buy IT equipment and it wasn’t cheap, but a new term was starting to gain momentum – total cost of ownership (TCO). TCO was popularised by Gartner and it meant that it was no longer sufficient to just think about the procurement costs of IT we needed to start talking about other costs – operating costs, training costs, support costs, licensing costs, management costs, consumable costs. This change in thinking put personal computing under a bright spotlight as a place where organisations were spending huge amounts of money compared to the procurement costs of the equipment. PC support organisations were shown to be significantly larger per user than the equivalent mainframe support organisation (or so it seemed).

In the mid-90’s we started looking at ways of driving down the costs of personal computing; techniques that made use of network technologies to make things easier and to reduce the amount of travel needed for support purpose. We figured that if things could be centrally managed then they ought to be cheaper to operate, and perhaps there were some benefits for the end user in doing this too. The organisation I now worked for had a Novell Netware infrastructure (which was the dominant way of doing it at the time), but our client preferred us to look at Windows NT as the way of achieving this. They’d already done some work with the technology, some of it out of curiosity about it’s key developer, Dave Cutler, who also had a lot of involvement in the development of Digital OpenVMS. People who already supported OpenVMS, like myself, saw a lot of commonality between the two.

The free-spirited pioneering days were coming under significant pressure to demonstrate their value, but that’s another journey for another day.

My changing workplace:

My changing workplace – part 3: The mid-to-late 90's

One thing I should say about this little series is that I’m writing the commentary as I remember it. In the previous post (part 1 and part 2) my memory of the sequence of events is clearer for some reason. I started this post thinking that I could cover them all in one post, but it was getting way too long, so there’s more to follow.

I’d moved to yet another office, this one was smaller and only had four of us in it. Each one of us has an L-shaped desk facing into the corner.

A number of tectonic technology shifts had occurred since the early 90’s. The first and most immediately visible shift was the emergence of operating systems and personal computers. I’m not just talking about PC’s, there were all sorts of personal computing being used around the place.

There were UNIX workstations from Sun, Digital, Silicon Graphics and IBM. I remember being quite impressed by the Sun SPARCstations, particularly the ‘lunch-box’ sized ones that stacked together with other SCSI connected peripherals. If I remember correctly there was one particular character in the office who’s stack of papers on his desk were always at least as high as his stacks of SPARCstation equipment. The IBM AIX Workstations were used extensively in the design department for 3D CAD. There were a few Silicon Graphics devices, limited to some high-end graphics requirements that we had. There were also VAXstations and X-terminals. These systems were all used for engineering purposes. Calculation has always been a huge part of engineering, those calculations where becoming computations and the computations were being integrated into applications. The human barrier to calculation was being removed.

Over on the business systems side another set of personal computers and operating systems were being used. DOS was still being used, as was Windows ’95 and Windows ’98, we also used IBM OS/2 1.3, 2.0 and Warp 3. As business systems these devices were used for word processing, spread-sheets and the newly emerging activity of presentations. Because we had a strong IBM heritage and also a history with Lotus Software we preferred the IBM OS/2 and Lotus SmartSuite approach. People would ask us all the time why we didn’t use WordPerfect, they were wrong. When Lotus was purchased by IBM in 1995 we thought that there was a winning formula there, we were very wrong too. Neither WordPerfect or Lotus SmartSuite would be the ultimate winners in the battle for dominance of office automation software.

On the hardware side of things, being an IBM shop, we preferred the PS/2. We thought that the MCA architecture was superior to the ISA architecture that all the clone manufacturers were pursuing. We stuck with IBM even after the PS/2 had been superseded by the IBM PC Series 300 and 700 (named in BMW model style). PCI was replacing both MCA and ICA. There were a number of clone devices around, primarily those from DEC and latterly Compaq, but there were also a number of Toshiba laptops around. The DEC devices were introduced by the teams supporting the engineering computing environment. IBM’s grip on the PC hardware and software market was well and truly slipping. At some point, I don’t quite remember when, we left IBM behind for desktop devices and moved over to HP Pavilions we never went back.

The laptop was a luxury and only provided to those who were important enough to justify it. I remember the embarrassment of one particular manager who had left his laptop on the roof of his car, forgotten about it, and then reversed down a hill, eventually driving over the top of his much loved Toshiba. It survived quite well, remaining in working order apart from a big crack down the middle of the screen. Most laptops were, however, IBM ThinkPad even after we had switched over to HP for the desktops. There was a number of people who got massively excited about the Toshiba Libretto. The problem with laptops of the day was weight and the diminutive Libretto promised a lot more mobility. They never really took off. The same was also true for the HP OmniBook 300 with it’s odd, inbuilt, mouse contraption. I’ve had a number of ThinkPad’s down the years and they’ve always been reliable work-horses.

There were also a number of Apple Mac devices around, but they were seen as special and only used by the people in some of the graphics departments. In our little office of four one of the team spent much of his time fulfilling the needs of this community, but Mac’s were never regarded as mainstream devices.

Most of these personal systems were built as stand-alone devices. Each one was built in it’s own unique way with floppy disk and CD, a few applications were becoming available on DVD but only the newest devices could read them anyway. We would know some of them intimately because all of the support was done in person. Most of my time was spent tripping from one device to another, changing a configuration here, adding some software there. We only patched things when it was absolutely necessary.

Another class of devices were also starting to be used, the PDA. Some people had tried to use the original Psion organisers but it was the release of the Psion Series 3 that moved these devices into the mainstream. When in 1998 Psion got together with other Nokia and Ericcson to form Symbian everyone thought that this plucky British company was onto a winner, we were, again, wrong. Another set of devices were already starting to become popular, the PalmPilot. The Apple man in the office played around with the Newton for a period of time too. HP introduced the Jornada PDA running Windows CE in 1998, that never really took off either.

The mobile phone was starting to have an impact too. My first mobile was a Nokia 3100 and later moved onto a Nokia 6130 which I still have today (It still works and occasionally, when the kids have damaged their more modern mobiles I’ve made them use it as a lesson. They affectionately know it as ‘bricky’). The cost of calls was high and we still did a lot of communication via pagers. The mobile phone was, after all, just a phone, although people were already starting to think of it as a more general communication device. At some point we started to use SMS for text messages, but that was, again, limited by the cost.

In a few short years computing had moved from 8-bit to 16-bit and on to 32-bit and 64-bit systems, it had also moved from the computer room onto our desks and into our pockets. Our expectations of what we could do had massively shifted too. Most documents were produced by the author and the typing pool was becoming a thing of the past. The personal printer had also arrived and we no longer took the long walk to the print room. We didn’t always print everything either, email was becoming the normal way of communicating.

There were other tectonic technology shifts changing my workplace. The network was starting to change the way that we thought about the whole computing landscape,
things were becoming connected. Microsoft was building a position of dominance with Windows and Office. Applications were becoming client-server.  I no longer worked for an engineering company, I had been moved into an IT company through the emerging business trend of outsourcing.

Those shifts will, however, have to wait for another day.

My changing workplace:

My changing workplace – part 2: Into the 90's

I started work as a mechanical engineer, but my eyes were opened to a new future after a rotation into the computer services department.

LismoreLike many organisations of its day this particular organisation had many different people owning and operating what we might call ICT today. This particular computer services department came out of the business services side so ran a mainframe. There wasn’t really a choice in those days – business system ran on mainframes.

Just like in ancient days where it was the person who could make fire who was revered, in this mainframe dominated world it was the mainframe sysprog who was honoured and feared. The last thing you ever wanted to see was the tall wiry man in the corner stand up with a bang of his hands on the desk and march towards your desk; or even worse for him to stomp into the computer room and then to stomp back to your desk having restarted everything. This was an experience I endured on a few occasions, fortunately I’m quite a fast learner.

The office was strategically placed next to the computer room because people had to be near the computers to look after them.

At the other end of the room to the tall wiry king was a line of three desks with phones. These were the home of the help-desk which had permanent occupants – in the mornings. In the afternoons everyone else in the department took their turn at phone duties except, of course, the tall wiry sysprog king.

In my first office the hierarchy of the office was defined by the chairs, in the computer services department it was defined by the model of IBM terminal that you used. Some people had colour screens some really important people had more than one.

As a business systems organisation the purpose of the mainframe was to support the manufacturing and finance processes of the organisation. Like most organisations at that time these systems were written by the organisation itself in COBOL.

IBM DisplaywriterLike I said in my last post the primary purpose of the computer was to produce paper. In the middle of the computer services department were a small group of people who looked after office systems. Some people around the organisation had been using IBM DisplayWriters for some time but this team were starting to deploy an emerging computer platform – the IBM Personal Computer.

This was the days of DOS and the primary application being used was DisplayWrite 4 a word-processing application. Another important application was the spread-sheet – Lotus 1-2-3. I remember spending many days using another programme, Lotus Freelance, to produce a whole set of overhead projector sheets that were printed out on another relatively new invention the HP LaserJet printer. These PC’s weren’t connected to a network though, they had a card in them to let them operate as IBM Mainframe terminals. All of the data was stored onto the 3.5" floppy disk.

One of the office systems team had been looking at a system called Microsoft Windows, but no-one was quite sure why you would use it. Very soon, though, things were about to change because there was talk of something new called Windows 3.1.

The computer service department didn’t have anything to do with the Digital VAX computers, they were there to support engineering, and engineering looked after their own. Actually, part of the reason that they used Digital VAX machines was so that they had the freedom to look after the computers without interference from the computer services department.

Both Digital and IBM were developing another new capability – email. And that’s where I came in because the computer services department had decided to deploy DISOSS on the mainframe; they’d also decided to deploy All-in-1 onto the Digital VAX environment. We live in a world where email is so ubiquitous, even too ubiquitous, it’s good for us to remember that this is a relatively new method of communication and also remember that we’ve come a long way. I started off in the DISOSS world until it became OfficeVision over time I also extended my scope to include All-in-1.

A colleague writes very eloquently about the cycle of innovation and I’ve seen a number of technologies work from genesis to utility – email is one of them.

DISOSS and All-in-1 were both built to allow people to communicate with people using the same system. These systems weren’t built for interoperability they different in every way, they even had different addressing systems. Like the early days of electricity people invented their own way of doing things because there wasn’t yet any pressure to interoperate. Neither of them supported SMTP, the protocol that supports billions of emails across the internet today, DISOSS used an IBM specific protocol (SNADS), All-in-1 used the ISO standard x400. We then had to deploy specialist gateways to enable them to talk to each other. Another set of gateways were required to interchange the directory information. We had no idea of the impact that these technologies would have on the workplace.

It was around this time that the organisation needed to extend the computer rooms and we were moved to a new office with, for the first time, L-shaped desks because there was an expectation that people would have a computer on their desk. It was about then that we started to look at different ways of connecting PC’s together but even in this different teams had different ways of doing things.

About this time people started to talk about another new concept – the paperless office.

My changing workplace:

My changing workplace – part 1: The 1980's

When I started full time paid employment in the later days of the 1980’s I walked into an office partitioned by large steel filing cabinets. Some of the filing cabinets had extra locks on them for security. Between the lines of filing cabinets were sets metal desks arranged in blocks of six.

Stack 'em highEach desk had draws down either side, a softer covering on the top and a chair. My chair was a simple wooden affair, others had arms. At one end of the main office were individual offices with dark wooden desks and leather chairs.

It took me a long while to realise that you could define the organisation hierarchy by the type of chair and the location of the desk. My simple wooden chair and desk located at the end of a row and the end of the office defined me as the office junior. If I wanted arms on my chair I would need to get a promotion.

My tools were paper, pen and a terminal. I didn’t have a terminal on my desk, no-one had a terminal on their desk. The terminals, both IBM 3270 type and DEC VT100 types, were arranged on a separate set of desks with a book at the end. The book was diary for each desk. If you wanted time on a terminal then you needed to book it. You also had to be prepared to have someone more senior to come along and take precedence.

DEC-VT100

If I need to communicate with someone I had two choices – phone or walk. The only phone was the desk-phone which wasn’t called that back then because the mobile phone was something reserved for a limited few (who had arm muscles and a wallet big enough).

It was clear where the people in the office spent their time and effort and it was processing paper. Everyone had cupboards and draws full of paper. The in-tray was the way that information was passed between people. If you did use a computer for a task it’s job was to produce paper. Sometime I’d go down to the print room and there waiting for me would be a whole box of continuous paper, normally the result of a mistake.

Most of the paper, however, was still produced in the typing pool from written notes. Everything that went to the typing pool was thoroughly considered before it was sent because the last thing you ever wanted to do was to go back to them to ask them to retype something. There was a rumour that somewhere in the organisation they were starting to use something called the Personal Computer.

A clocked-in and I clocked-out using a card which was placed into the machine. The cards where thus stamped with the time I came in and the time I left. At the end of the week I would add up the times on the card to demonstrate that I’d worked enough hours. The only work I did was between those two times.

There was a computer services department, but that wasn’t where I started, I started as an engineer.

My changing workplace:

Getting back into the flow

Today is one of those days when I’m trying to get back into the flow of work after a week of holiday (yes, very nice thanks for asking).

Earlier in my career I worked on projects and getting back in to the flow was simpler – meet with the rest of the team working on the project, find out about progress, start my activities. These days my role requires me to oversee a number of different activities that are going at different paces, occurring in different locations and require a different level of involvement from me.

My normal routine in this situation is as follows:

  • Go through my inbox, filter items into ‘actioned’ or ‘to action’ folders taking note of any that may be urgent.
  • Do the same with my other data sources – corporate social network, feeds, etc. I’ll star items as I go through these lists for further reading or comment.
  • I remain in a form of radio-silence throughout this time so I can get through it uninterrupted
  • Eventually I’ll go online to the corporate instant messaging service and see what interruptions arrive
  • Check my voicemail
  • Review the items in my ‘to action’ folder and build a to-do list.
  • at some point I’ll have a call with other members of my team, but that’s normally precipitated by one of the items on my to-do list.

This time I’ve decided to perform this ritual in the office which has worked a treat because I’m the only one sat in my section. There is still some noise distraction so I am wearing the headphones:

"40 hours a week is just about right"

Productivity is the key to business success, not working hours.

Derwentwater RootsFor centuries we’ve known that productivity is heavily influenced by the number of hours we work. We know that we have to put in the hours if we are going to produce anything, but we also know that if we work too many hours our productivity decreases. Put simply – there’s a limit to how much you can produce in a week.

Inc. returned to this subject this week – Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week:

The workaholics (and their profoundly misguided management) may think they’re accomplishing more than the less fanatical worker, but in every case that I’ve personally observed, the long hours result in work that must be scrapped or redone.

This article was written on the back of the announcement that Sheryl Sandberg the Chief Operating Officer at Facebook leaves work at 17:30 every day to be with her family. That this is newsworthy is itself a testament to the state of the modern working environment.

The Inc. article is a good summary of the issue, but there’s one part that I’d quite like to comment on:

Proponents of long work weeks often point to the even longer average work weeks in countries like Thailand, Korea, and Pakistan–with the implication that the longer work weeks are creating a competitive advantage.

However, the facts don’t bear this out.  In six of the top 10 most competitive countries in the world (Sweden, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom), it’s illegal to demand more than a 48-hour work week.  You simply don’t see the 50-, 60-, and 70-hour work weeks that have become de rigeur in some parts of the U.S. business world.

As a worker in the United Kingdom I can tell you that while these details are technically correct, they aren’t practically correct, as least not from my perspective. I know many people in Britain who regularly put in 50, 60, 70 hour working weeks and have done so for an extended periods of time. For them these kind of working hours have become de rigeur. We have traditionally had quite a lax implementation of the working time directive so it’s not really appropriate to assume that people work less than 48 hours because that’s what the law says.

It’s personally very interesting that five countries (50%) who, I understand, implement the working time directive in a more stringent way are ahead of the UK in the Global Competitive Report. So in that respect the article still makes a very valid point, we still have a lot of lessons to learn.

Releasing creativity through doodling

An interesting article in the Wall street Journal entitled Doodling for Dollars says:

YewPut down that smartphone; pick up that crayon.

Employees at a range of businesses are being encouraged by their companies to doodle their ideas and draw diagrams to explain complicated concepts to colleagues.

While whiteboards long have been staples in conference rooms, companies such as Facebook Inc. are incorporating whiteboards, chalkboards and writable glass on all sorts of surfaces to spark creativity.

This is something I have noticed too. People are so distracted by technology these days that they need to be drawn into a meeting before they really engage. The most productive meetings I have are ones where there are a small number of people all contributing to a whiteboard. It’s not possible to be a part-time member of that type of meeting, you’re either in, or you are out.

The most popular posts on this site continue to be ones on Rich Pictures which is a form of doodling to communicate a concept. I regularly walk into meetings with sheets of A3 paper in order to draw out what I think I’m hearing, this often takes the form of a mind-map, but is just as likely to be a spider diagram linking together the conversations.

"Companies need to help employees unplug"

This is a quote from Ndubuisi Ekekwe in the Harvard Business Review talking in an article entitled Is Your Smartphone Making You Less Productive?:

Companies need to help employees unplug. (Of course, every business is unique, and must take its own processes into consideration. But for most companies, giving employees predictable time off will not hurt the bottom line.) In my own firm, when we noticed that always-on was not producing better results, we phased it out of our culture. A policy was instituted that encouraged everyone to respect time off, and discouraged people from sending unnecessary emails and making distracting calls after hours. It’s a system that works if all of the team members commit to it. Over time, we’ve seen a more motivated team that comes to work ready for business, and goes home to get rejuvenated. They work smarter, not blindly faster. And morale is higher.

Give it a try in your own company. As a trial, talk to your team and agree to shutdown tonight. I’m confident that you’ll all feel the benefits in the morning.

How do you try to create shutdown times and unplug?

(May I apologise for my ramblings last week, there was way to much information in one post, I promise to be get back to my normal approach of little and often)

"Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change"

In a follow-up to here very popular TED talk on vulnerability Brene Brown talks about the impact of that first talk and the power of shame.

In talking about the impact of the initial talk she talks about requests from the business community to go and speak, but not to speak about vulnerability to talk about innovation, creativity and change, it’s then that she uses these words:

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change”

How true those words are.

Brene Brown: Listening to Shame

Post 1000: Thinking about thinking, the brain and information addiction

Today is my birthday, it also happens to be the day on which I have reached 1000 posts, so it seems like a good time to reflect a bit on previous post themes.

Morecombe Bay SunsetWe are currently going through a revolution that is being fuelled by technology but is primarily a social and economic change.

I first posted about this back in 2006 when I started with a couple of posts:

Both of these posts put forward the view that the people we are going to need in the new economy are people who are versatile generalists and people who are creative. In other words we are going to move from a left-brain economy to a right-brain one, at least in the traditional developed economies. This, in turn will make the brain ever more important.

I have a nagging fear and it’s this: The brain is ever more important yet we make people work in ways and subject them to technologies for which we really have no idea of their impact. In other words, I worry that we will, in years to come, see employees suing their employer for the damage that they have received through the impact of current technology much like we have seen mine workers receiving compensation for the impact of their chosen trade on them.

I worry that the millions of people constantly being interrupted by Facebook and Twitter are doing themselves unseen and yet to be understood damage.

We are already starting to know about some of the impacts and they are concerning.

It’s already accepted wisdom that people’s attention span is shorter than it used to be. In a post from 2010 Nicholas Carr stated that The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains.

There’s impacts such as information addiction are starting to be documented, researched and understood. But we are only at the beginning of that journey. I know of a number of young people who rarely leave their bedrooms and think nothing about putting in 10 hours solid on a particular game. I know of people who can’t go for more than a few seconds without having to check-in to one or other of the social media networks. Anyone else heard the phrase Facebook widower?

Then there are impacts such as the drive to multitask even though we are awful at it and it causes us all sorts of problems. One of the more popular posts on this blog is entitled

“Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy”. I wrote that post back in 2008 and then Walter Kirn estimated that workers wasted 28 percent of their time "dealing with multitasking related transitions and interruptions". Multitasking has become a huge epidemic everything from the woman who was driving behind me yesterday while on the phone (in her hand) and doing her lipstick through to the conference calls which you know would only take 10 minutes if everyone just concentrated.

There is immerging evidence to show that the brain of digital natives is different to that of digital immigrants like myself, but do we know that’s a good thing?

There’s also the physical impact that I know a number of people are already experiencing, I explain my experience with in blogs about Tension Headaches. There’s also the current conversation and research on the dangers of sitting for long periods of time.

It’s time to look after ourselves and especially to look after our brain.

(I was amazed how much I had written on this subject once I started looking into it, but I’ve kept the post short because I know how short an attention span you all have Smile)