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Steve's clean whiteboard
Here is a photo and a blog post from a guy who I mentored a couple of years ago – Steve Keevil. I like his attitude to a problem that dogs us all. A to-do list that you don’t do!
Here is what he says:
For a long time the white board contained a lot of items that I failed to do.
Ideas that were had and never achieved.
And then I’d beat myself up over my lack of achievements and then procrastinate from actually doing something proactive to change this. It became a slippery slope.
So this year… the simple rule is, if it’s not on the board then I’m not working on it.
So I’ve done the same here at Martonhouse.
Following on from Edit Blindness something happened yesterday that hasn’t happened for a while – we went out for lunch!
We keep going on about it here on The Learning Journey and that is because it is a vital ingredient to the success of your day. Sometimes though a working schedule, such as our recent busy time doesn’t allow for it and even though we still ate food at about the right time we were rarely moving from our desks to eat it and that went a good way towards edit blindness we suffered.
Getting out for lunch is incredibly liberating, whether it is with other people or by yourself. Being by yourself allows for some thinking time, whilst being with other people can provide some much needed distraction from the stuff which is at the front of your mind for the other 7+ working hours of the day.
For people who work from home mainly by themselves a lunch out with other human beings can provide a form of escape and some necessary social skills which can be lost by working alone.
I actually did go out for lunch today but sadly ended up in the middle of a cloudburst. It was entertaining to say the least.
Do you make time for lunch? Did you get out today? What did you eat? How did it affect your afternoon?
image courtesy of Red Bubble and artist Mike Stimpson. You can see more of Mike’s wonderful Lego art here.
As you may have guessed from the slightly more sporadic postings appearing on the blog we’ve been very busy working to deadlines here.
Being busy though doesn’t mean our brains aren’t quietly collating more data for future posts though.
All 3 of the film guys here at Marton House have been working alone in darkened video edit suites for too long and it was only a matter of time before one of us snapped. This time it was Tim, whom we discovered the other day wandering the corridors, swilkering coffee around and muttering something about not being able to “see” the project anymore.
This was a problem he termed “edit blindness”, you may know it better as not being able to see the wood for the trees. Either way it is a point in time when you have been looking at something for too long and suddenly none of it makes sense and you can see no way to proceed.
At this point you start making serious errors and the best thing you can do for the project and more importantly yourself is to step away. Take a break, have a look at something completely different for a while. Come back to it later, or maybe even the next day if the project can afford it with a fresh perspective on things.
Tim is now stable again thankfully, for the time being at least.
When talking with many of our customers the answer would appear to be a resounding yes. Employees of companies that have adopted Blackberry technology tend to feel trapped, on one hand they hate their Blackberries but on the other feel they can’t live without them.
The big question is why?
I personally see a Blackberry as a more advanced version of a pager. They feel more like a way of the company communicating to/at you rather than a tool to help you do your job better and more efficiently.
We’ve had so many reports of people not even able to get a full nights sleep because an email or a message will come through and they can’t resist reading it and responding to it.
So how do companies make a Blackberry more attractive to its employees? How could it be more of a useful tool?
As an employee how would you feel if instead of a Blackberry you were offered a learning device which would not only send you corporate communications but also offer you a complete multimedia training solution? Maybe a tool that could help you perform research for that important meeting you are on your way to? A tool that is constantly connected to the company and the world at large but also has the ability to disconnect from work out of hours and offer social entertainment?
When the iPhone was first launched in late 2007 it was just a small object of desire, a phone with entertainment and web browsing as standard. The problem was it had limited business use. That has changed with version 2 though and Apple are now tackling Blackberry head-on with full support for Microsoft Exchange and push emails.
Blackberries would appear to be optimised for email first, iPhone for web. In this information hungry world surely a phone that is optimised for the internet has far greater potential as a business tool?
Now that Apple have included 3rd party application support it has opened up a whole new world of possibility for the iPhone and its users. Apps like Salesforce Mobile, a tool for organising and referencing prospect information and data or Lion Clock, an app that lets you keep track of project billing on the go.
As a company you also have the benefit with the iPhone of rolling out training to each and every handset no matter of the end users location. Whether it’s a video message from the CEO or a Flash-based training exercise the iPhone can handle it no problem and report back to base when the results from the training are in.
This morning over on Jay Cross’s Informal Learning blog there is a video he filmed yesterday at the Future of Media Summit ’08 featuring Robert Scoble talking about where he feels learning will be in the immediate future. For me the interesting point he made around his baby boy growing up in the world that is always connected seemed completely logical. The ability to research absolutely anything right now is going to be vital going forwards, not just for businesses but also for individuals and life in general. You can watch the whole video below.
So how would you feel if your company was to give you an iPhone instead of Blackberry? Would it inspire you, motivate you or still weigh you down?
How many times today have you been left fumbling around for a word which you know instinctively is rattling around somewhere inside that void of a mind?
Lifehacker points us to this video which claims to be able to help us.
Remember these?
The humble filofax was the ultimate status symbol of the 80’s. If you had one you were either regarded as a top business person by some or as a dreaded yuppie by others.
Filofax’s are still around just nowhere near as popular as they once were. Maybe it’s that in this technologically wonderful age it has been replaced by things like mobile phones, Blackberries, iPhones, iPods etc. The great thing is all of those things are smaller but they all do roughly the same thing as a Filofax – they store data. Dates, times, appointments, meetings, notes, memos and most importantly ideas. Heck you can even scribble on most of them with a fake pen or a finger.
Have we all lost the ability to store those great ideas that sneak up on us? If we don’t write them down somehow we’ll forget them.
How do you know if an idea is worth storing? The answer is you don’t but the trick is if the thought is interesting, jot it down. You may come back to it later and think it’s a load of old rubbish but it’s only relative to your current state of mind and who knows tomorrow it may be a real gem!
Today’s learn comes courtesy of “the show” from zefrank. Click the image below to learn about the “That makes me think of…” technique. Be warned though zefrank is just a little bit radical, which is why you should be watching him.
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