The full title of this article should really be “Increase Productivity by Quantifying Simple Tasks; Protect Complex Task Productivity by Not Quantifying It”. This is the result of a study by Aruna Ranganathan, co-authored by Alan Benson, that studied workers in a garment factory and I’ve added my opinion because sometimes I’m a narcissist like […]
Category: Opinion
Full credit to Geoffrey Moore, whose seminal “Crossing the Chasm” keeps proving to be a useful book thirty years after it was written. Credit also to Hans Baumhardt who introduced me to the book and who critically shaped my thinking about work and life. What I hope do, now that the credits are over, is […]
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The Fly on the Windshield
Every organisation has to deal with this problem. It has been described in many different ways, including the famous quaductionism of “Urgent vs Important” to the simplicity of phrases like “firefighting”. Yes, it’s all those tasks that people seem to want now, which are stopping you from doing the real work. My analogy for this […]
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Working With Public Coronavirus Data
The UK Government provides public datasets that can be used by the media or the public. One such dataset contains information collected for the Coronavirus pandemic and its impact on people living and working in the UK. The problem with this dataset, though, is that we weren’t able to record the data until after the […]
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Should I Migrate to Hey for Email?
Having signed up the wait list for Hey, I received my invite and subsequently undertook a two-week trial. What happened next has changed how I interact with email forever. Although I may be repeating information that is already out there, I’m going to focus on a small number of features that let you change your […]
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The Lockdown Effect
As some countries around the world lift restrictions following COVID-19 lockdowns, we can start to see the effects the lockdown will have on different companies and industries. From the data I have seen so far, the lockdown effect seems to divide organisations into three broad categories: winners, losers, and recoverees. Let’s look at what this […]
Half-human, half-bird; the sirens lured hapless sailors to their destruction. Your window could be doing the same to you in your new WFH set up. Over the years I have been responsible for several office redesigns. The most common trigger for me to wade in and start moving furniture is the location of desks in […]
Firstly, to list of the sampling issues with this experiment would mean a near-infinite scrollbar. The intention here is not to say that “this is what you will experience”. The purpose of this article is to show that annoying adverts make more money than subtle advertising; but that you should test how much more and […]
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Tragic Competition
Tragic Competition occurs when the service fragments between many service providers, and each charges a similar subscription. For example, you can currently subscribe to a music service provider who will give you “all music” for $10/month… imagine if this was replaced with multiple partial offerings at the same cost, for example each record label offering […]
As we entered 2020, you will have no doubt heard people celebrating the new decade. Just as certainly, you will have heard those declaring that this is not the start of a decade, because we have to wait until 2021. In this post, I rebut this tiresome pseudo-intellectual peacocking and gift back to the humble […]