News

You’ve already decided what you want, now you’re going to justify it

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BBC News Online has done one of it’s promotion features where you don’t realise it’s a promo to the end – but then it also promotes so much that you no longer need to see the real thing. This one is about the way we really make decisions:

Our thinking is riddled with systematic mistakes known to psychologists as cognitive biases. And they affect everything we do. They make us spend impulsively, be overly influenced by what other people think. They affect our beliefs, our opinions, and our decisions, and we have no idea it is happening. It may seem hard to believe, but that’s because your logical, slow mind is a master at inventing a cover story. Most of the beliefs or opinions you have come from an automatic response. But then your logical mind invents a reason why you think or believe something.

Toby Macdonald, Producer, Horizon

I think I like that. The idea that we compulsively decide on something and then our brains conjure up a great post-rationalisation, it feels like it speaks to all sides of our noggins.

Macdonald writes much more and presumably then the Horizon episode How You Really Make Decisions shows us more still tonight, Monday 24 February, 2014 at 21:00. That Horizon link is to a webpage that has a clip now and will hold the whole episode later – if you’re reading it in the UK.

Seriously, who are these people? Treehouse drops all managers

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This is the company that hires people at full, good pay to work only four days a week. I wrote about this in January:

Ryan Carson of the technology firm Treehouse proposes that maybe we can work four days a week and do more with it. He’s not trying to save money: you get paid your full, normal salary, you just don’t work five days a week. It sounds like he’s a productivity guru looking for a startling yet appealing angle, but the fella has his reasons and he’s put them to work: this is genuinely how his company is run.

– A Four-Day-Week With Pay (The Blank Screen), 7 January 2014

The real kicker for me, the reason to tell you about it, was that this was revealed after many months so the idea was tested. It wasn’t just a theory. Now the firm has revealed that there was something else going on:  you knew there was a catch, didn’t you? No, there isn’t. They were just doing something else and not telling one: they were getting rid of all managers.

If you are a manager and just paused with a biscuit at your lips, they didn’t fire them. They got rid of the role and of the title and everyone who was a manager now works alongside everyone else. Carson says it’s as if they hired six new workers.

Now rather than the standard model of how a business runs, Treehouse has a holacracy: anyone in the firm – anyone – can have an idea and try to get it done. Rally support, get others in on the idea, and if enough do, it gets done. If they don’t, it doesn’t. (Holacracy is a new term to me: if you don’t know it, think of how bittorrent works by spreading the work between many peers instead from a central source. Or think of bees. Carson says it’s like a beehive. And Wikipedia gets serious on the topic.)

Carson says:

It was a bold move and one that not everyone was convinced of. We proposed to change the way the company operated and give all employees 100% control of their time and let them decide what they work on each day. From now on no one would tell anyone what to do, not even the CEO. (Me!) – See more at: http://ryancarson.com/post/61562761297/no-managers-why-we-removed-bosses-at-treehouse#sthash.JbjTp3SW.dpuf

He says that in his blog, The Naive Optimist, where he has begun a whole series of articles about this. You would expect that he’s going to tell you at length how great this idea is and, actually, fair enough. If it hadn’t worked, you have to assume we’d never have heard a word about it and Treehouse would’ve gone back to the old system. So yes, there is a lot about how well it’s working. But it’s fascinating and most especially so when he gets into why it isn’t. Why it fails, when it fails, and what they have to do about it.

Oh, and Treehouse is a firm doing online teaching for coding. Like you cared. You just want your firm to do the same.

Thirty years of Macintosh

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I would not being doing the job I am, I would not be enjoying it the way I am, I would not have had the wide-ranging, bouncy career I have – if it weren't for the Mac.

I'm not kidding.

Apple's Macintosh made such a difference in my life that today, on its thirtieth birthday, I've written about it over on my personal blog, Self Distract.

I'd very much like you to take a look.

Amazon goes timey-wimey

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This is not scary: Amazon hopes to ship items to you before you've ordered them.

It actually isn't scary, it makes more sense than you'd first thing but that first thinking you did either went the 1984 Big Brother route or the Doctor Who timey-wimey way. The truth is boringly in the middle, but:

The Seattle-based giant has patented a method of shipping products before customers even place an order. In December, Amazon was granted [a patent] for what the company describes as “anticipatory shipping,” or a way of initiating the delivery process before a customer even clicks buy. The idea is to cut down delivery time and, possibly, make it even less necessary to visit brick-and-mortar stores. The document describes a process for boxing and shipping items the company expects customers in a specific area will want — based on previous orders, product searches, wish lists or the contents of a shopping cart before checkout.

That's from Time magazine.

It makes sense but that doesn’t mean you have to like it: LogMeIn goes pay-only

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It’s a good service and it has to make money to survive, but the announcement that the remote-access LogMeIn is changing to subscription only is a disappointment.

LogMeIn is a way to take control over another Mac or PC wherever you are. With permission, obviously. But it works so well: I’ve sat at my iPad remote controlling my office iMac, then skipped over to doing something for Angela on her Mac mini, then once or twice also gone to remotely do something on my MacBook Pro. Very quick, very handy. And without it I wouldn’t have been able to look back across the Atlantic during my last holiday to see if my Mac was on and whether I had a particular file someone needed.

Definitely an excellent product so definitely worth paying for. Except, I bought the iPad app called LogMeIn Ignition and that cost £20. I’ve certainly had my use out of it, but when it was sold, it was sold with the idea that this was it forever. You want to do more with LogMeIn, you want to control lots of computers or something, you then paid for the subscription model. But otherwise, the app was it.

Not anymore.

I’m reluctant to be disgruntled about it because, again, I’ve got my use out of LogMeIn Ignition, yet I will admit I am disgruntled. I am unhappy about it. Maybe I’d feel this way if it were only the LogMeIn Ignition change but there’s also that last year the company announced limits on how many computers a free user could have – and those have now been dropped too. Over the years, LogMeIn has also pushed extra products that don’t happen to be of any value to me, like its cloud storage system Cubby. Nice name, don’t need it.

So conditions are added and then dropped, you get used to having to say no to Cubby and other prods, the latest version of the desktop software was a bit of a pain, it’s all gone from a great experience to a well-at-least-you’ve-paid-once-and-that’s-it and now to nope-you-have-to-pay-again.

If you’re a LogMeIn user, the next time you try the service you will start a clock: you get seven days from that moment to when you have to choose which payment plan you’ll accept. Prices start from $49/year for existing customers; that’s half price and only for the first year.

It’s funny: LogMeIn is being completely reasonable about charging for its service and its service is very good, yet doing it this way leaves a bad taste. You know there’s a PowerPoint slide somewhere at the LogMeIn offices which says they’ll lose a huge number of users – and you know there’s a second slide saying that most of those don’t pay anyway so good riddance to them.

I paid for the app, I would pay for the app again, but it’s not worth the subscription price to me so I’m one of the good riddances.

Read more at LogMeIn itself.