america

You possibly are or aren’t more productive when you have time off

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There’s a snippy article in the Harvard Business Review that begins:

We were recently working with a company in Amsterdam, and having difficulty getting a summer meeting scheduled because of the number of executives who were on vacation. Experiencing some frustration, we began to wonder how this company actually got its work done.

Ewwww, catty.

But their VP of HR assured us, “I am confident that because of the rest and break from work that our European executives get more accomplished in their working days than those in the U.S. who burn themselves out.”

Harvard Business Review then says “this seemed worthy of some research” but you have to read it as Challenge Accepted.

After that, it gets a bit muddy. Are you more productive if you have time off? The best way to summarise the findings is in that wonderful Simpsons quote: “Short answer yes with an if; long answer no with a but”.

Read the full piece by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman (HBR 17 June 2015) to see them throw statistics in your face and then try to play it both ways.

Writing as a career – in 1940s America

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Say, are you a young boy looking to make a career in hard news journalism or a young girl who wants to write about cake decorations? Never fear: Arthur P. Twogood tells you all you need to know in this instructional careers video from around the 1940s. Apart from a so-painful-it’s-funny segment about women journalists, it is rather fist-on-your-chin fascinating to see how news writing used to be. If you redid this video today, we’d see someone receive a PR email, copy and paste it into a website and go home.

Subscription reading not coming to Amazon UK yet

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The US version of Amazon has today announced Kindle Unlimited: for about ten dollars a month, you become a subscriber. It says here that you can rent as many books as you like but people are already discovering that not all authors are available.

That will change and at some point presumably the Kindle Unlimited service will come to the UK. But until it does, take a look at a video on the Amazon US site that explains how it all works.

Presidential Productivity

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TO DO LIST

Argue with Congress
Pick up laundry
Avoid a land war in Asia

As President Obama gives his State of the Union speech, take a look inside how he works. If POTUS isn't the busiest person in the world, I don't know who is. And you know you can learn from how he physically does the job – regardess of your politics.

Last year, 99U went through detailed articles about the President's day to day regime in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, amongst others. Culled from those pieces is a straight list of just five things to do when you're juggling the fate of the free world in your hands.

Working for yourself is harder and better than you think

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Lifehacker has a smart post about what it's really like when you go work for yourself. Some of the details are very USA-specific – naturally, since Lifehacker is an American site – but the principles are the same here in the UK:

Often, people want to freelance or start their own business because they're lured by the freedom of working from home. If that's what you care most about, you're probably better off trying to convince your boss to let you telecommute and learning about the downsides of working from home rather than leaving your employer to work for yourself.

List articles – 5 things to eat, 10 things to sell or whatever – are usually quite lazy pieces of writing that are also pointlessly empty. And I'll give you seven reasons why. But this one is simple and straight and practical: I'm not sure I've ever read it all put so well as Lifehacker does.

I've been freelance since the mid-1990s but I also had an enormous crutch of a regular client for a dozen years so I felt I eased into this life. Can't imagine going back now, but I can imagine doing this freelancing an awful lot better: when you've read that article, follow its many links out to further advice. It's a smart collection.

Really excellent news for 3 UK users

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The company’s announced free text and data for UK users travelling around the States. I’ve just come back from California and they’re right: my iPhone usage had to drop like a stone for fear of the bill.

I was once lost in France for ten minutes – er, I didn’t just teleport there and get confused, it was the last ten minutes of a trip – and using Google Maps on my phone tripled my bill for the month.

So I love this news. I’m especially pleased because I’m on 3 but it’s great news all round because you know, you just know that other carriers will follow

Details on Cult of Android here:

Three U.K. To Give Customers Free Calls, Texts & Data While They’re In The U.S.