Sep 2
Netflix lets its staff take as much holiday as they want, whenever they want – and it works
In his new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, New York University scholar, Clay Shirky, argues that when we design systems that assume bad faith from the participants, and whose main purpose is to defend against that nasty behaviour, we often foster the very behaviour we're trying to deter. People will push and push the limits of the formal rules, search for every available loophole, and look for ways to game the system when the defenders aren't watching. By contrast, a structure of rules that assumes good faith can actually encourage that behaviour.
via telegraph.co.uk
Sep 2
An interview with Ben Hammersley : The Setup
"I had an epiphany about 8 years ago, when my home office went from having 4 big tower PCs in various states of repair and OS, along with my own servers and NAS and lots of cable runs and so on, to a singleiBook running off Wifi. I used to spend an hour a day doing admin tasks and updates, and the rest of the day listening to cooling fans. Then I went cold turkey, dumped the lot, bought a mac, and haven't looked back. I can get my geek cred from actually doing stuff, not by spending time configuring something in the hope that I will. And I get a lot more done letting Google worry about my email."
Aug 24
Task versus OmniFocus
Messing with Things, trying to determine if this is the best task management system for me. I think I need to get this more organized and get back to the idea of offloading stuff from my brain. OmniFocus seems way too complicated for the way I work, but I hate that Things won't cloud sync. I love the simplicity of things. I'm also not keen on shelling out all the money required to move to OmniFocus on Mac, iPhone, and iPad, which I'd be doing primarily to get cloud sync. Come on Cultured Code, everyone else can provide this, why can't you?
Aug 23
Results versus Effort: I
If you tell me that what's important are results and not effort, but then require me to work a set minimum number of hours every week, I'm unlikely to believe what you said.
Aug 19
BBC News - Cleaners 'worth more to society' than bankers - study
"Rather than being wealth creators bankers are being handsomely rewarded for bringing the global financial system to the brink of collapse
Paid between £500,000 and £80m a year, leading bankers destroy £7 of value for every pound they generate".
via news.bbc.co.uk
Aug 4
Gartner Says the World of Work Will Witness 10 Changes During the Next 10 Years
The workplace is becoming more and more virtual, with meetings occurring across time zones and organizations and with participants who barely know each other, working on swarms attacking rapidly emerging problems. But the employee will still have a "place" where they work. Many will have neither a company-provided physical office nor a desk, and their work will increasingly happen 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In this work environment, the lines between personal, professional, social and family matters, along with organization subjects, will disappear. Individuals, of course, need to manage the complexity created by overlapping demands, whether from the new world of work or from external (non-work-related) phenomena. Those that cannot manage the underlying "expectation and interrupt overloads" will suffer performance deficits as these overloads force individuals to operate in an over-stimulated (information-overload) state.
via gartner.com
Jul 27
Before the flood - The Globe and Mail
I’m a rabbit in the Eastern astrological chart, and we like to stay in our burrows and lead quiet lives. In the Western astrological chart, I’m a Scorpio, and we like to spend our time in the toes of shoes, and we’re quite happy there unless somebody puts their foot in.
Nonsense like this is why I don't bother with Margaret Atwood. She's as bat-shit insane as Orson Scott Card, just in a different, less foaming-at-the-mouth way. I'm supposed to be interested in stories about science-caused dystopias from someone who believes in astrology?
