I think any description I try to give you of this article on Clickhole – The Onion’s version of Buzzfeed – would spoil it, including in fact this one. Please empty your head of anything I’ve just said and go take a look.
Ugh. Post-It Notes work
I’m not listening. I’m not. Don’t ever do this to me. Do Not Ever.
[Randy] Garner experimented to see how quickly people would return a follow-up survey if there was a sticky note attached and also measured how much information the person being surveyed returned if there was a sticky note attached vs. the group that received no sticky note.
Further experiments revealed that if a task is easy to perform or comply with, a simple sticky note request needs no further personalization. But, when the task is more involved, a more highly personalized sticky note was significantly more effective than a simple standard sticky note request. What makes it truly personal? Writing a brief message is effective, but adding the person’s first name at the top and your initials at the bottom causes significantly greater compliance.
I’ve used this personalization theory with business people around the world to great success. For example, a mortgage broker I worked with tested this approach in mailings, effectively doubling the number of phone calls from people pursuing a loan with the broker. And it’s not just effective at the office or with clients—the people you live with are going to respond to the sticky note model as well. (Try sticking one on the bathroom mirror and see what happens.)
The Surprising Persuasiveness of a Sticky Note – Kevin Hogan, Harvard Business Review (26 May 2015)
What would happen is that I would vomit. I’m papyrophobic. So here’s the link to read the full HBR article and here’s a link to read the entire research paper but I ain’t reading either.
Short answer: Lunch Bad, Chocolate Good
Okay, that’s not really the finding of this video but it’s in there and I needed something to pick me up from the excessively jaunty music. Take one minute and one second to watch how eating the right thing in the right place, with chocolate and friends, is better for your afternoon’s productivity than a burrito at your desk. Not 100% sure what a burrito is.
UPDATE: the video isn’t displaying on all mobile devices. If you can’t see a cheery video below, try it on the original site.
Travel the world to become better at business. Okay.
Putting aside that most of us will not have the ability to travel the world, there is a lot to like in this piece by Harvard Business Review writer Gillian Morris.
Except it’s also depressing. She’s positive and pragmatic, she criticises American attitudes to getting something done compared to other places where people just do it but there is something more. Her core argument is that in America, people think you apply for jobs or you hire people to do things for you whereas everywhere else you go, you have to hustle.
I’ve little against hustling. Finding a way to do something, learning it, looking for the people you need, that’s all normal and that’s even great. There’s just a line somewhere in here that bothers me. Morris speaks of the need to, for instance, give someone your leather jacket in order to get them to recommend you. There’s quite a bit about having to bribe your way along though she doesn’t use that word.
She’s been around the world and I haven’t. She’s seen extremes and I’ve worked almost exclusively in the UK and the US, nowhere else. But I come away from this feeling she thinks America’s way ought to be right, is somehow ideal, yet we’d better toughen up and learn what it’s really like out there in the world.
Go have a read yourself, would you? Gillian Morris: Travelling the World Made Me a Better Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review, 26 May 2015.
Developer on why you should and how you can write in Evernote
The Evernote blog is always very heavily pushing the use of this software – you’re understand but, still, it could lighten up once in a while – but amongst the sales talk there are good ideas. Here’s one on how this software is great for writers. I’m a writer and I use Evernote extensively. Can’t say it’s my favourite writing tool but the suggestions in this are good and also short.
In the late 1940s, Jack Kerouac wrote his iconic Beat-era novel “On the Road” in a series of notebooks. In 1951, he typed the manuscript out on a continuous 120-foot scroll of paper. It took him three weeks and, as legend has it, a friend’s dog ate the original ending.
More than six decades later, the laptop holds court where the typewriter once reigned. We still carry trusty notebooks, but now we can easily digitize the words within to keep them safe. The tools have evolved, but the need to turn ideas into written words is still vital to work and life.
Evernote is a boon for writers of every stripe. Even a few low-tech Luddites we know use it in tandem with their handwritten words. Here’s how it can support your writerly efforts…
Put it in Writing: Be a Better Writer With Evernote – Kristina Hjelsand, Evernote Blog (14 May 2015)
The first tip also links out to how Neil Gaiman uses Evernote so, okay, they’re not kidding.
Read the full piece.
Damn bank holidays
They’re worse than Sundays. And who asked us if we wanted bank holidays? I deliberately chose to not go into banking in order to escape these wretched days off but, nooooooo, we have to have them and we have to keep on having them. Bastards.
I sense you’re not with me here.
So how’s this? It appears that you will do more work in the run up to and the return from a three-day weekend. It’s not a shock but it’s now official – a bit. Kinda. Here’s a US report on the volume of emails that will be sent this weekend: it’s Memorial Day in the States on Monday but for once both sides of the Atlantic have a day off so this is relevant to us both.
More emails are sent in the days leading up to and following a three-day weekend holiday to compensate for time off,” says Anna Holschuh, an engineer at Yesware, an email tracking software provider. “So instead of actually doing less work, we’re just cramming it into fewer hours.”
[But[ Your inbox won’t be as full over the holiday weekend. The Yesware study found that people send 40% less emails on holiday Mondays than regular Mondays, and 5% fewer emails over the weekend.
The Good (And Bad) News About Three-Day Weekends – Stephanie Vozza, Fast Company (22 May 2015)
Read the full piece.
New book on Blackberry is a lesson
I’ve said this before: what really makes the technology industry interesting is that it is like every other business played in fast forward. You can see familiar rises and falls but so fast that you can genuinely see them: it’s no longer a business school exercise, it’s today’s news.
A new book concentrates on the fall of Blackberry and specifically how the iPhone effectively and dramatically ended what was the most beloved phone company in the world.
From Amazon and the publishers’ description, this is Losing the Signal:
In 2009, BlackBerry controlled half of the smartphone market. Today that number is less than one percent. What went so wrong?
Losing the Signal is a riveting story of a company that toppled global giants before succumbing to the ruthlessly competitive forces of Silicon Valley. This is not a conventional tale of modern business failure by fraud and greed. The rise and fall of BlackBerry reveals the dangerous speed at which innovators race along the information superhighway.
With unprecedented access to key players, senior executives, directors and competitors, Losing the Signal unveils the remarkable rise of a company that started above a bagel store in Ontario. At the heart of the story is an unlikely partnership between a visionary engineer, Mike Lazaridis, and an abrasive Harvard Business school grad, Jim Balsillie. Together, they engineered a pioneering pocket email device that became the tool of choice for presidents and CEOs. The partnership enjoyed only a brief moment on top of the world, however. At the very moment BlackBerry was ranked the world’s fastest growing company internal feuds and chaotic growth crippled the company as it faced its gravest test: Apple and Google’s entry in to mobile phones.
Expertly told by acclaimed journalists, Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, this is an entertaining, whirlwind narrative that goes behind the scenes to reveal one of the most compelling business stories of the new century.
The book is released 26 May and can be ordered now from Amazon.
How to Work Out Your Hourly Rate
I read this ten seconds ago and rush to bring it to you. I’ll be off now trying this out for myself, will you join me? It’s an online hourly rate calculator for freelancers. Contently just covered it, saying in part:
Many people assume figuring out what your hourly rate should be is a simple task. If you’re a freelancer who wants to make $30,000 a year, just figure out how many hours you work per year and divide, right? Not quite. And as any veteran freelancer will tell you, calculating desired rates requires a much more complicated equation.
Basically, before you know thy employer, you must know thyself. BeeWits, a project management software company, wants to help you with that process, and the company’s new rates calculator is straight out of a freelancer’s dream.
Press “Calculate My Hourly Rate” and presto! Your rate, down to the cent, pops up. It would be great to have an explanation of the calculator’s exact formula, for transparency’s sake. And we’d also love if the calculator could save your numbers to refer back to in the future. But if you’re looking for a thorough tool that can take care of some multi-variable accounting, this is perfect.
The Freelance Rates Calculator We’ve All Been Waiting For – Gabe Rosenberg, Contently (20 May 2015
Read the full piece for their take on it and then use the calculator itself online.
Action Steps
Sounds like a Stairmaster. The blog Journl maintains everything in life comes down to three steps – of which the first is:
Action steps are the small, concrete tasks that characterise your everyday existence (the grocery shopping trips you go on every week, the bills you pay each month) and build towards a higher objective (keeping yourself fed, keeping your house warm). Though they may not be the most glamorous of tasks, their presence within a routine keeps things ticking over, allowing more time for projects of greater ambition.
Increasing Your Productivity Using the Action Method – (no author listed), Journl (7 November 2015)
Read the full piece for a touch more on this one and then the mysterious second and third steps.
It’s bigger than that, it’s huge
So this is what a critical path is:
Establish a critical path
A big task can be overwhelming and you might not have any idea where to start on it. In cases like these, establish a critical path where the key aspects of the job are ascertained, along with the time that should be taken to complete them, any dependencies between them and their logical end points. Creating a Gantt chart is particularly effective here. One of the underrated aspects of this step is the fact that establishing a critical path will enable the job to be completed more quickly, so it is a skill well worth learning.
Read the full piece for more on critical path analysis and five other tips for the very biggest projects.