Since I have nothing to write about today, I’d like to share this story from “Linchpin” by Seth Godin. Forty years ago, Richard Branson, who ultimately founded Virgin Air, found himself in an airport in the Caribbean. They had just cancelled his flight, the only flight that day. Instead of freaking out about how essential the flight was, how badly his day was ruined, how his entire career was now in jeopardy, the young Branson walked across the airport to the charter desk and inquired about the cost of chartering a flight out of Puerto Rico. Then he borrowed a portable blackboard and...

I recently read a great blog post called The Myth of Efficiency. The premise is that for knowledge workers, trying to build more efficient work processes or implementing time saving “efficiencies” is not an effective way to boost productivity. Here’s a (lengthy) excerpt that I especially liked: The idea is that time has a monetary value (say, the per-hour employment costs of each employee), and if you save time, you save money. One example that LeBlanc mentions is moving printers. It seems to make sense on its face. You spend time walking to and from the printer. Therefore, printers...

How much “work” actually gets done in the course of a typical eight hour workday? 3 hours? 4 hours at most? So much of the typical day is wasted in meetings, small talk, coffee breaks, checking e-mail – and of course, interruptions. According to this article, interruptions – phone calls, e-mails , take up approximately 28% of the typical knowledge worker’s day. (That’s 2.25 hours out of an 8-hour day.) This is yet another reason that the standard idea of the cubicle job with the 8 hour day is outdated. Why are companies paying people to sit around and hang out and be...

A family member of mine recently went through a serious health scare. She’s doing better now, but it was quite a frightening experience, to say the least. Times like these remind me of the great play “A Man for All Seasons.” The last lines, spoken by the play’s narrator, The Common Man: I’m breathing…are you breathing too? It’s nice, isn’t it? It isn’t difficult to keep alive, friends. Just don’t make trouble. Or if you must make trouble, make the sort of trouble that’s expected. Today I’m going to spend some time just being...

There’s an old saying in sales, “you eat what you kill.” But customers aren’t prey, they’re renewable resources. If you do great work and treat your clients well, they will reward you with repeat business, referrals, and a self-replenishing supply of money coming in. Don’t “kill” your customers. Cultivate and nurture them. You don’t always have to eat what you kill; sometimes you eat what you...

I found a hilarious article the other day in the Newsweek archives…back in 1995, a guy named Clifford Stoll penned an op-ed for Newsweek titled: “The Internet? Bah!” He goes on to talk about all the ways in which the Internet had been overhyped and wasn’t going to turn out to be that big of a deal. Reading it now, in 2010, is deeply entertaining. Here’s a sampling: The truth is, no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works… How about electronic...