I ran across and interesting quote by Albert Einstein the other day.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
~ Albert Einstein

This isn’t exactly the best known quote by Einstein and I doubt many teachers quote this to their students. Reading is generally a good thing, but if it starts becoming a substitute for thinking on your own it can hold you back from reaching your potential.

This quote touches on a problem that holds many people back from actually accomplishing things. It is easy to spend so much time researching that you never actually execute.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read, do research and try to learn from others, but at some point you have to decide that you’ve gathered enough data and the time has come to do something. That may be starting your own business, writing a book or even repainting your living room.  You have a very finite lifespan. Some people spend their life preparing for what they want to do without ever actually doing what they want to do.

Sometimes the most helpful situations are the ones that force you to go ahead and do something by removing the option to try to collect more information.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• reading too much (47)
• too much reading (17)
• read too much (11)
• how much reading is too much (8)
• i read too much (6)
• albert einstein (6)
• einstein (4)
• scientific name for reading too much (3)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Stop Reading on the Internet
• Tuesdays Tip: Time for Reading
• Taking the Time to Read
• Do You Read Enough?
• Reading More

Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be what is happening.  The small town where I live voted to raise local taxes to make up some of the difference in funding to try to maintain the status quo as much as possible. I’m not opposed to paying more in taxes if the result is better educated kids but doing the same thing we’ve always done with just a bit less total funding isn’t going to result in any deep an meaningful innovation.

The problem is that we are terrified of implementing change–often for good reason. If you are on the school board, pushing for change means that some people are not going to like you. Re-evaluating the purpose of education and aligning your efforts with that purpose means there are going to be people whose pet projects and favorite programs are going to get modified or even cut entirely.

One of the biggest barriers to meaningful change is good leadership. A committee of people doing things in a way to minimize the blame is not an inspiring model. Change requires that someone stand up, takes responsibility and communicates clearly a compelling vision of the future.

Think about the difference. Which do you think it more likely to be able to make real changes in education?  A committee of people wringing their hands at the test scores and lack of funding or a person who stands up and says “Here is what we can do to make sure our kids are the smartest in the state at a lower cost than we’ve ever done it before.”

This doesn’t just apply to school systems.  Change is hard in every area.  Here are three things that you can do to get innovative ideas and then see those ideas actually put into action.

1. Have good ideas and a vision

This sounds like a very basic thing, but it is surprisingly uncommon.  If you have a goal and a plan to get there, you are going to be miles ahead of everyone else.

2. Understand and communicate your purpose

Part of the reason change is hard is because people don’t agree on what you are trying to accomplish.  Simply being able to communicate and build consensus around a focused purpose is a huge step.

3. Test, measure & be willing to undo

People are a lot more willing to try something they don’t fully like, if you are clear how it will be measured and what threshold will justify abandoning it. People have been burned too many times by ideas that aren’t ever fully implemented, never achieve their promised potential and are kept around anyway. In fact this is why many people get suspicious of your motives when you propose change.  They don’t expect you to actually measure if the change is beneficial or not, so they think you may have ulterior motives.

Change is hard, but it is very necessary. Unfortunately most people aren’t going to support change until terrible things happen–terrible things that are often the result of putting of change for too long. With the right person,  the right ideas and the right vision of the future change can happen that isn’t driven by catastrophe.  Support that person.

Better still, be that person.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• aversion to change (2)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Expect Change
• Previous Posts
• Bank Mistake
• Preparing for New Technology
• Worry vs. Problem-solving

Al used to work for Ernst & Young where he spent his working with a bunch of different companies. A good percentage of his time was spent in meetings, so he is in a good place to understand the problems with normal meetings. More importantly, he has some great ideas about how meetings should be used and how they should be avoided.

Why are you so passionate about making better meetings?

I’m in love with the idea of organization. The promise of organization is that individuals working together in alignment, can achieve way more than the the sum of those individuals could on their own. This is how we put a man on the moon, invented the Iphone, and created the internet.

But in so many organizations, meetings are disgracing that promise. Meetings are debilitating collaboration, and preventing forward progress instead of enabling it. I’m fascinated with the possibilities that could be realized if we fixed this problem.

What if someone takes exception to some parts of the Modern Meeting Standard?

The Modern Meeting Standard at it’s essence is a posture, an attitude, one that demands we reinvent meetings. I’ve developed a methodology, and people may not agree with everything, that’s fine.

Every organization has different needs, and each one must develop a meeting system that works for them (as long as it addresses the delayed decision making, culture of compromise, and false urgency I write about).

What is crucially important is realizing that the meetings system is broken beyond repair and we need to fundamentally reinvent it. Start there.

It sounds like one of the leading causes of unnecessary meetings is organizations where the person who needs to make the decision doesn’t necessarily have the authority to do so. How do you structure an organization so this isn’t the case?

There’s no one structure. Every organization is different. What I do know is that the real problem is not structure, it’s culture. Stephen Covey wrote years ago about the speed of trust. I think that’s what we’re missing: trust.

Do you empower your people to make quick decisions, or do they have to seek your approval every single time? Do we feel the need to be included on all decisions? Are we able to accept the consequences of someone who makes a bad decision?

If we want an organization with flexibility, velocity, and power, we need to embrace a culture that trusts others to make decisions without requiring endless approvals. The Modern Meeting Standard forces teams to confront this fact every time they have a meeting. That’s a powerful first step.

How much of the modern meeting crisis is caused by poor writing and reading skills?

Too much. We call a meeting instead of writing because we know our people don’t read. We don’t read, because we’re certain that if the information is that important, someone will probably call a meeting. It’s a horrible conundrum, that results in absurd meetings where people are herded into a room just to be force fed information.

It’s an incredibly wasteful epidemic where there is a simple (though not easy) cure: Everyone agrees to cancel all the informational meetings and instead write clear, cogent memos. And in turn everyone commits to reading the memos without fail.

So how do you learn to write better? I know a lot of people really struggle with writing and often don’t feel there is anything they can do to change that.

The only way to get better is to practice. I wish there was a shortcut but there isn’t. Try going an entire week (or at least a couple of days) without picking up the phone or calling a meeting. Force yourself to write cogent thoughtful messages to your colleagues instead. That’s a great first step.

If someone reads your book and likes the concept of the Modern Meeting Standard, how should they get started? (Particularly when they aren’t in a position to dictate company wide changes.)

Convince just one person to hold a modern meeting: your boss, a colleague, a manager. This isn’t easy, but it has to be done. Your organization depends on it. This revolution can spread fast inside your company. All it takes is one courageous person to stand up and say, “Hey, can you read this before our next meeting, please?”

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• al pittampalli (31)
• how to pronounce pittampalli (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Interview Posted
• Looking for Bloggers to Interview
• Productivity Expert Interviews Recap
• Large and Multiple Monitor Study
• Your Turn — Three Questions

A person determined never to be wrong won’t likely accomplish much.

~ Ken Wisdom

Of course that doesn’t mean you should try to make bad decisions, but it does mean that lack of action is more harmful than occasionally making a mistake. At the very least, making a mistake means you are doing something and the chances of success when you are actually doing something is much greater than the changes of failure when you are unable to decide what to do next and do nothing.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• doing nothing is wrong (2)
• doing nothing doesnt mean youre doing wrong (1)
• doing nothing is doing something (1)
• doing something wrong vs doing nothing (1)
• im doing nothing because than at least im doing nothing wrong (1)
• quotes about doing something wrong (1)
• What does they cant take away your birthday (1)
• why doing something wrong is better than doing nothing (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Bank Mistake
• Proper Length Cables
• Don’t try to Catch a Pizza Thief using Email
• Share Your Answer – Tips for a Home Office
• Productivity501 Design Update

The book lays out a plan for more effective meetings with the following seven principles:

1. Meet only to support a decision that has already been made.
2. Move fast. End on schedule
3. Limit the number of attendees.
4. Reject the unprepared.
5. Produce committed action plans.
6. Refuse to be informational. Read the memo, it’s mandatory.
7. Work with brainstorms, not against them.

The book is an easy read. It is only 66 pages long and very much worth the investment of your time. Many of the principles are similar to the points we covered in 9 Tips for Effective Meetings.

It is easy to overlook the cost of meetings to an organization.  Tools like the Time is Money timer help with this, but  you really need to change the culture of your organization.  Getting everyone you work with to read this book is an excellent way to start.  Just send your team the following link and encourage them to download their copy, but do it soon because the free offer is just a temporary thing sponsored by Citrix:

http://amzn.to/rojokx

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• read this before our next meeting (301)
• read this before our next meeting download (10)
• read this before our next meeting free (6)
• read this before your next meeting (5)
• htsf (1)
• Read This Before Our Next Meeting DOWNLOAD EBOOK (1)
• Read this before our Next Meeting ebook (1)
• read this before our next meeting free download (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Interview with Al Pittampalli
• Book Summaries Sale
• Reading More
• Free Book Summary
• Taking the Time to Read

This is common sense, yet I am amazed at how many companies simply don’t get it. I have cable internet through Suddenlink.  They routinely send me flyers for VOIP and security services. However, they don’t offer either service anywhere in my town. Still, several times each year I get a flyer encouraging me to call in and order these non-existent services. This isn’t too bad.  I’m not interested in either service.  The only way I know they aren’t offered is because I asked one of their techs about it when we were discussing their infrastructure for dealing with power outages.  In this case, it is just a waste of money.  They are sending me cards for a service they don’t offer so I couldn’t buy them even if I wanted.

However, some companies go well beyond this and do marketing that makes potential customer’s hate them.  For example:

I would like to get DSL because it is twice as fast as I can get on a cable modem, but I’ve been told repeatedly that it isn’t available at my house and that AT&T isn’t really interested in building out their infrastructure to support DSL in this area.  Today, when I got a postcard from AT&T trying to get me to sign up for business DSL, I was very interested.  After looking at the card I was even more interested.  The card wasn’t one of those deliver-to-everyone-in-the-city addresses.  It had my actual address and company name. It also had my telephone number included on it.  That seemed pretty promising.  AT&T went through enough effort to match my telephone number with my address and send me a card announcing DSL service. Surely this must mean they have DSL service to offer me.

I called and was immediately put on hold for 15 minutes before talking to anyone. A recording playing over and over kept saying how much they appreciated my call.  Evidently AT&T really likes my call and doesn’t want to let such a good thing end because when I finally got ahold of someone they said they needed to put me on hold again (for another 30 minutes!).  Finally a different person picked up.  I told her that I was interested in the DSL service.  She asked for my address and went to check her database.  She came back on the line and told me that service was not available.  They have a database telling them who can get DSL and yet they insist on sending cards out to people who they know cannot get the service and then make them wait on the phone for 45 minutes only to be told it isn’t available!

This is counter productive marketing.  Not only is it a waste of AT&T’s resources, but it is a huge waste of my time.  Stupid marketing can take a potential customer and turn them into someone who absolutely loathes your business.

Business is about doing smart things. If you run a business, use the data you have to do smart things.  If your marketing department/person doesn’t have enough skills to only send targeted advertisements to addresses where your service is actually available, your company has some serious problem in the hiring process.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Smart Shopper
• The Rat Experiment
• Effort vs. Ability
• 6 Ways to Look Smarter
• Business Liability Webinar

Time discounting applies to areas other than money as well. In particular it effects the way we perceive our efforts in the area of time management and organization. For example, spending half a day organizing your work space will give you benefits in the future, but it has a present cost. Because of time discounting, you are likely to underestimate the amount of benefit being organized will give you in the future. Another task that is 31% less beneficial, but with immediate results will likely appear to be more attractive.

Time discounting explains some of the reasons we procrastinate. Working on something that isn’t due for 2 weeks often has a lower perceived benefit than doing something much less important right now. This explains why it is sometimes easier to spend an evening watching television instead of preparing for a presentation that is coming up in a few weeks.

Just being aware of time discounting can be a big benefit. If you realize that you are likely to underestimate the value of future gains, you can compensate in your planning. Another possibility is to assign a “value” metric to each of your tasks. If you can do this ranking from a third person perspective and think about the value of the task and not when it needs to occur, it will give you better insight into its actual benefit.

Reference:
“Individual Differences in the Use of Time Management Mechanics and in Time Discounting” in Individual Differences Research, Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 194-207

Originally published on June 9, 2007.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• time discounting (529)
• time-discounting (6)
• discounting for time (2)
• discounting for time defintion (2)
• leah nass (2)
• definition of time discounting (1)
• time discounting znači (1)
• people will discount the value of a gain made in one year by 32% over how they would value the gain made immediately (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Previous Posts
• The Most for Your Minute
• Attention Spans and the Internet

Much of the time, once you get started you’ll find that what was really holding you back was just starting the task. This is a great way to handle exercise. If you dread going to the gym, go for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes if you still don’t want to exercise, you can leave. If you don’t like it that day, no problem, you made the effort and you’ll stay longer on a day when you like it better.

We can apply Newton’s first law of motion to fight procrastination. It is easier to keep something in motion if it is already moving. Once we start something, it is easier to keep at it, but starting is the hard part.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• go gif (37)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Tuesday’s Tip: Get a Good Pen
• Tuesday’s Tip: Travel Paper Folder
• Tuesday’s Tip: Handwritten Notes
• Tuesday’s Tip: Pennies
• Tuesday’s Tip: Kind of Like a String Around Your Finger

Mentally demanding work requires taking break to stay efficient. Unfortunately we have a cultural viewpoint that encourages people to see taking a break as a weakness. Nothing can be further from the truth. Taking a short period of time away from your main task requires a discipline.  It takes discipline to know when to start and it takes discipline to get back to work once your break has served its purpose.

Not all breaks are equal.  For a break to be beneficial it needs to let your mind and body to something very different for a short period of time.  If you sit and work at a computer all day, one of the worst things you can do is to try to use Facebook or a news website as a break.  It might be a bit of a mental shift, but it isn’t actually doing something different.

Here are some attributes of a good break for people who sit at a computer:

• It should require you to focus on things at a different distance than what you do at your desk.
• Things that raise your heart rate are helpful.
• It should use some type of skill like: balance, timing, motor skills, etc
• It should be something you can do in 5 to 10 minutes.
• Getting some sunlight is good.
• The activity should make you happy.

Activities that meet those criteria are going to help give your conscious brain the time off it needs for your unconscious brain to do work.  Here are some activities that work well:

Take a walk

A brisk five to ten minute walk is ideal–particularly if you can do it outside. Walking isn’t a particularly mentally intense activity, but it usually offers enough of a diversion to let you at least partially stop thinking about whatever you were working on. Walking will help get your blood flowing which will help you be more alert when you return to your work.

One of the advantages of taking a walk, is that you can do it almost anywhere–even places that may frown on taking a break with some of the other activities.  The trick is to have something you are doing–it could be running down to the mailroom, heading to ask a co-worker a question on a different floor, etc.

Of course getting outside and walking through an area that has grass and trees is even better. There have been some interesting studies that showed people’s happiness increases when exposed to nature.

Juggle

Learning to juggle isn’t particularly difficult and it is an ideal exercise to take a break.  It requires fine muscle control, timing and can burn a reasonable amount of energy.  Most important it is fun. It is hard to not be happy while juggling.

I had the good fortune of going to a small school that didn’t have a gym.  During the winter months we would find things to entertain ourselves on break and one year a good percentage of the school learned how to juggle. Here are a few tips for geting started:

• Learn the patterns from Youtube or a juggling book.
• Juggling with three balls is not done in a circle. You will be doing a criss-cross pattern that is much easier.
• If you use silk handkerchiefs at first, they fall more slowly and give you more time to think.
• Bean bags don’t roll, so you’ll spend less time trying to catch them.
• Once you know what you are doing, heavier balls can give you quite a work out.
• I use to be able to juggle basketballs and they can really wear you out as well, but aren’t very well suited for the office.
• Klutz has a good book on how to get started juggling.

Of course the problem with Juggling is that it looks like you are just goofing off. If you don’t work in an office where they will understand the importance of taking a break, you might need to reserve this activity for lunch time when the boss doesn’t feel like you are on the clock.

Remote control helicopter

I got a small $30 electric helicopter for Christmas.  I’ve found it is a great way to take a break.  The battery only lasts 5 to 7 minutes so it cuts you off when it is time to get back to work. The helicopter doesn’t burn much energy, but it does use some motor skills and spatial reasoning that I don’t really use much in anything else.  In that sense it offers a nice diversion that is very different from my work.

Of course if your boss doesn’t want to see you juggling, flying a mini helicopter around the office isn’t probably going to look very good.  So maybe this is a better choice for people who work from home.  The fact that it cuts you off after 5 to 7 minutes means you can’t forget about the time accidentally, which is another plus for working from home.

Some tips for remote control helicopters:

• Get one with a gyroscope so it has a bit more spinning resistance and you can focus on flying rather than just trying to trim it.
• The Syma S107 is a good fairly inexpensive model.
• Keep the blades away from your monitor and flat panel TV.

Legos

Five minutes playing with legos is a valuable diversion.  It uses your fine muscle coordination and gets you using your spatial reasoning and imagination. Even more important–Legos is nothing like your normal work (unless you are an architect), so you’ll be using a different part of your brain and relaxing the part that needs to go into subconscious mode for awhile.

Magnetic poetry

When I was managing a staff of 11 people, I put some magnetic poetry on the side of a file cabinet.  You couldn’t spend too long fiddling with the words because you had to stand to be in front of them. It provided a nice mentally challenging diversion for a few minutes.  The ability to see and modify what your co-workers had written helped create a bit of community interaction as well.

Play with kids

Once again this is mainly for people who work from home. Seriously, there are few things as different from sitting at a computer doing mental work than playing tag with a 3 year old or making a fort with some chairs and a blanket.

Exercise

A good workout is going to take more than 5 to 10 minutes, but our goal here is to benefit our brain more than getting into shape.  10 minutes on an elliptical machine or lifting some weights can be very valuable.  While you might not be able to fit a treadmill in your office most people can fit a small set of dumbbells under their desk. There is a danger that spending 10 minutes doing light exercise will keep you from doing a proper workout when you aren’t working.  Just remember that the five minutes is more of exercise for your mind than for your body and don’t let it keep you from working out the way you should.

I have seen some treadmills with built in desks that allow you to do some types of work while walking.  This could be idea if you need to spend 30 minutes going through your email or reviewing some document. It might even be a good way to do a conference call.  I’m not sure how well it would work if you were needing to actually type something.

Conclusion

Taking a break can help you focus and concentrate and make you more effective.  Making breaks part of your routine and having the discipline to take a break and then come back and focus on work can help you get more done than you could otherwise.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• benefits of taking a break at work (13)
• benefits of taking breaks at work (11)
• taking a break quotes (8)
• taking a break from facebook quotes (4)
• take a break quotes (3)
• quotes about taking a break from work (3)
• benefit of taking breaks (3)
• benefits of taking a break from working during school (2)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Christmas Break
• Taking a Break
• Breaking the Internet
• What Would You Tell Yourself in High School
• Time to Think

1. Not all of your time is valued the same

It is easy to assume that if you make $20 per hour, any task that you can pay someone $10 per hour to complete should be outsourced. My normal rate for consulting is $145 per hour.  If I was to apply this logic, there are very few things I’d do for myself.  But, I have a limited number of hours each month that are worth my $145 rate.  Those are my best and highest performance hours.  Even if I do 8 hours of consulting in a single day, it isn’t like having someone else mow my yard or sweep my house is going to give me two extra hours of the same high performance output.

If you are doing work that is challenging, you can’t simply tack on more hours and expect to maintain the same quality of output.  You need breaks and time doing other things. Hiring someone to mow your yard is only cost effective if that lets you work on something more valuable.  If you spend that time fiddling around on the Internet you probably haven’t saved anything.

2. Outsourcing a 10 hour task doesn’t save you 10 hours

The article mentions the tax example. I’ve done my own taxes for several years because by the time I get all the information together and answer the accountant’s questions chances are pretty high that I could be done with the taxes myself. Even if we assume I was much slower, there is a significant time cost involved in passing off a task to someone else.

Consider changing your oil.  Even if you have someone else do it, you’ll have to take the car to them, wait for it to be completed, pay them for the service and drive back home.  You still have to spend some time getting the oil changed.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t an efficient use of your time–just that it usually isn’t a simple trade off of “do I spend X hours or not.”

If you are looking for good things to outsource you need to find things that have the following attributes:

• Low “hand off” overhead or tasks were the cost is amortized over many iterations.
• Significant skill or equipment differentiation.

Getting your oil changed is probably a good example of these two things.  While you still have to physically take your car in to get it serviced, it isn’t like you have to spend an hour explaining how you want the oil changed.  You just give the mechanic the car and let them do the job.  There is also a huge advantage in having the skill and equipment to change the oil.  Just getting under my car would be a  problem for me, but the oil change place simply drives it over the work pit.

What you want to avoid is spending a lot of time handing off a task that only needs done once.  There is almost always going to be some type of overhead involved, but if you are trying to be efficient you want to minimize this as much as possible.

3. Freeing up an hour doesn’t necessarily mean you earn more money.

If I have someone else mow my yard, that doesn’t automatically mean I earn my standard rate for the time they are mowing. It only makes me more money if mowing my lawn was preventing me from doing billable work.

That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t hire someone to do yard work, but I need to be realistic about why I’m doing it.  If I hate mowing and want to hire it out, that is a legitimate reason.  I just need to be careful not to trick myself into justifying it as a cost savings measure when the reality is I don’t use the height of my grass to determine whether or not to accept a client.

Conclusion

Personal outsourcing can be a very important part of becoming productive, but you have to be very honest and realistic about what you are trying to achieve and what measures will let you achieve it. If you are interested in personal outsourcing you’ll probably enjoy the Ultimate Guide to Working with a Virtual Assistant. It goes into a lot more depth on some of these topics.

4.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Outsourcing Efficiently
• Links On Remote Assistants
• Lifesourcing
• Non-Virtual Assistant Story
• Outsourcing Ideas

One tip that I think is particularly helpful is to make sure you really want to do something.  I’ve touched on this idea before in When Procrastination is a Good Thing.

Leo also discusses how to deal with the Internet and the distractions of feeling like you constantly need to be “updated” on what is going on.  He has some excellent points and suggestions.  He also recommends using what he calls the 30 10 method.  You set a timer for 30 minutes and focus exclusively on your most important task.  Once the time is up you give yourself 10 minutes to do whatever activity normally keeps you from getting work done like checking email, Facebook, etc.

The book is a good read and valuable.  You can buy it from Zen Habits and it will be available on Amazon for the Kindle in the near future. if you buy it from Zen Habits you’ll also get the epub and Kindle version when they are ready.  You’ll also get a copy of some additional resources including an interview with Tim Ferriss.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• un-procrastination (34)
• the little guide to un-procrastination free pdf (20)
• Leo Babauta pdf (19)
• un-procrastination download (12)
• un procrastination pdf (11)
• Leo Babauta Un-Procrastination download (2)
• Leo Babauta (2)
• leo babauta epub (2)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Praise for the Procrastination Prevention Course
• Procrastinating in Sheeps Clothing
• Procrastination Course
• Looking For Procrastinators
• When Procrastination is a Good Thing

My job is driving me crazy!  I work in tech support, so I’m mostly getting paid to be there if there are any problems that come up.  This means many days I’m just sitting there dinking around on the internet for 2 or 3 hours at a time.  This might be a dream job for some people, but I feel like I’m losing my skills. I’d look for another job, but I think my place is pretty secure here and I don’t want to risk going somewhere else only to get let go in a bad economy.  Do you have any suggestions for me?

Brad

Those are some good questions.  I’ve previously talked about figuring out your work zone to help decide when it is time to leave a company and find employment elsewhere.  Ideally you want to be in the upper green zone or a bit in the yellow.  When you get over into the red you are getting stagnant. Brad sounds like he is definitely in the red zone or worse.  In fact Brad sounds like he may be in a position further to the right where the curve actually starts heading back down.

Normally I’d say it is probably time for Brad to look for a new job, but I understand his concern about the economy.  Before he leaves, it might be a good idea see if he can do anything to improve his current situation.  Perhaps there are some new areas that the company wants to get into, but doesn’t feel like they can afford another employee.  Maybe he can take on some new projects that are important, but have been put on the back burner.

Asking for more responsibility

When I was in college I took a summer job at a hospital where they needed someone to unbox computers and set them up.  It was pretty simple stuff and I was in a position where computers weren’t coming in all the time.  So I’d listen and see what types of problems people were having and then say, “I might be able to fix that, do you mind if I try?”  The executives were having a very difficult time connecting to the computer system from home because the modems would always lock up.  I asked if I could use an old computer to come up with a better solution and ended up creating a dial in system that solved the problem.  This kept me doing interesting things and also let me learn about stuff that went well beyond what I was hired to do.

Brad may be able to find things like this even outside of the area he is working in.  The trick is to find something that is being ignored right now so it can be done in his spare time.  Here are a couple ideas:

• Social media – lots of companies are interested in creating a Twitter account or Facebook page, but don’t think they have anyone to man it.
• Company intranet – Setting up a system to share information internally could be very helpful and is something that could easily be done during Brad’s downtime.
• Company webpage – Lots of companies have websites that are out of date.  If this is the case at Brad’s company he could volunteer to learn how to update it and start working on that during his spare time.

Asking for more education

Check the employee manual.  If they have a defined educational plan, Brad may be able to take some college course or other type of training while at work and while having the company pay for it.  There are lots of different online training companies that offer programs that would fit well into his periods of downtime.

The education could be classes related to his job, classes toward a degree in his field or training toward an industry certification.

Self education

Even if the company isn’t going to pay for it, Brad may be able to get additional training simply by spending his downtime learning about things related to his job to make him more skilled.  If he ever does leave the company this may help him get a better position in the future.  He can buy a technical book or use web tutorials to teach himself all kinds of things during his downtime.

Formal education

Even if the company isn’t willing to pay for it, Brad may want to look at taking online classes and paying for them out of his own pocket.  If his supervisor will let him use his downtime to study, this will basically mean he is getting paid to take classes–even if he has to pay for the tuition himself.  There are all kinds of online degree programs that he could use to increase his skill or get a bachelors or even master’s degree.

If he can show that what he is studying is going to help him with his job, most employers are going to be happy for him to spend his free time working toward bettering his skills instead of playing solitaire or minesweeper.

Productive time

The important thing for Brad is to make sure he doesn’t get lazy.  Instead of seeing a boring job as something bad, he needs to transform it into an opportunity to grow and learn and make his time at the company productive.  If he can’t find a way to do this, then I would suggest starting to apply to other jobs–even though there may be some risk. Over the course of Brad’s career, the risk of becoming out dated by not having any new challenges is probably greater than the risk of getting let go and needing to find another job.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• my job is boring (253)
• Boring jobs (224)
• boring job (217)
• how to deal with a boring job (55)
• job is boring (42)
• my job is so boring (15)
• how to handle a boring job (4)
• job boring (4)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Borrow from your IRA
• Three Things You Didn’t Know About Excel
• EchoSign Review – Electronic Signatures Made Easy
• AppSumo
• Two Task Lists

Did you write them down now?  Ok good.  Now, take a look at what you wrote down and divide them into two groups.

1. Things you can control.
2. Things you cannot control.

In general I find that people who accomplish very little tend to see all of their obstacles in the second category, while people who achieve things see obstacles in the first category. In other word, successful people understand that they are the biggest thing holding them back from their full potential. They know that accomplishing something is about what they do, not what they hope other people will do.

This may seem like a trivial differentiation, but it is fundamental in shifting to an internal locus of control where you see yourself as in charge and consequently see that what you achieve in life is dependent on the actions you personally take.

I’m not trying to suggest that you will never have any external obstacles. I saying that focusing on things you cannot change is not going to help you move forward.

Lets look at an example.  Bob and Alice are two (unrelated) individuals who have a desire to travel.  In fact, they are both interested in going on a cruise around the world. They both work similar jobs making similar amounts of pay, so the cost of a $30,000 cruise seems very high–not to mention being off work for about 1/3rd of the year.

If you ask Bob what the obstacles are to his goal of this world cruise, he lists:

• I can’t afford the cost or the time off work.
• My boss doesn’t pay me what I’m worth.
• The economy is bad and I lost a lot of money in the stock market.
• I wasn’t born into a rich family.
• I can’t risk not having a job after getting back from such a trip.

If you ask Alice, she lists the following:

• Working for someone else means that they need to make money of my labor so I only get a portion of what my value is worth.
• My current education and skill set makes it difficult to justify more pay.
• My expenses are high enough that I can’t save very rapidly.

Do you see the difference? Alice is focusing on things that she can change or influence.  Bob is focused on things that are outside of his control.  What is Bob likely to do to achieve his goal?  Probably nothing–maybe play the lottery once in a awhile.  What is Alice likely to do?  She might start her own side business, get a better education or take steps to lower her expenses.

If you want to get anywhere in life, make sure you concentrate on the problems that you can solve. Things that are outside of your control are just that–outside of your control so there is very little point spending any time dwelling on them.  Focusing on the things within your control puts you in a much better position to act and taking action is what will change your situation.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• holding you back meaning (32)
• what is holding you back (14)
• whats holding you back meaning (2)
• a word for something thats hodling you back (1)
• two people fight holding them back (1)
• what holding you back (1)
• what is holding you back in working (1)
• what to do when someone is Holding you back (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Tuesdays Tip: Start Something
• Personal Productivity from Management Theory – Ouchi
• iPod Contest – Review This Site
• Reader Question – Getting Your Money
• Scientists and Magicians

1. Go to work

When you work from home, your workspace may be just down the hall, but you still need to intentionally go to work when you are ready to start your day. Some people will walk around the block go to work in their home office and then walk around the block to “go home” at the end of the day. It may seem silly, but you will be much more productive by making a concrete breaking point between when you are at work and when you are off. You can still take advantage of a zero commute by breaking your day up and perhaps doing a few equivalent hours of work late in the evening or early in the morning–just be intentional about it. You don’t want to get into a situation where your work habits are the of “channel surfing.”

2. Create long, distraction-free periods

One of the advantages of working from home is being able to see your kids take their first steps, be there for the cable repair man, and be able to help your spouse bring in the heavy grocery items. On the other hand, with too many distractions, you won’t get any significant work periods where you can really get into your productive zone. Here are some things that can help:

• Shift your work hours to be be earlier or later in the day. For example, if your kids get home at 3pm, you might want to start working from home early so you can be off when they get home. Alternatively, you may find you get more done late at night when everyone else is asleep for the evening.
• Establish expectations with the rest of your household. For example: When your office door is closed, that means no interruptions unless it is an emergency. If a personal phone call comes in on your home phone, you are unavailable during work hours.
• Make sure your office isn’t in an area that needs to be frequently used for other purposes. You don’t want to be working in an area that is going to get a lot of traffic. Better to have a less desirable room for your office than have a constant stream of household members coming through all the time.

3. Get good equipment

There are definitely some ways you can save money with your home office. You can use a door as a desk or deal with an ugly file cabinet, but don’t put up with equipment that will lessen the quality of your work. Make sure you have a decent, reliable computer and a good backup plan for dealing with inevitable technology malfunctions. I don’t mean you need to spend money on the most expensive computer out there, but you definitely don’t want to spend hours each day dealing with unreliable technology.

Here are some areas that I would not recommend cutting corners:

• Computer – Doesn’t need to be fancy and doesn’t need to be particularly fast. Must be reliable.
• Computer Warranty – If your computer breaks, make sure you have a spare or a quick way to get it fixed.
• Monitor – If your eyes are tired, you aren’t going to get much work done.
• Chair – Doesn’t need to be expensive, but it needs to be comfortable.
• Climate Control – If you don’t get this right, you aren’t going to be able to concentrate.
• Lighting – Don’t subject yourself to hour upon hour of flickering fluorescent lighting when you work from home.

4. Dedicated office

Don’t try to use your kitchen table as your office when you work from home.  You need a dedicated area–preferably with a door.  If you don’t have an extra bedroom, you can finish a space in the attic, basement or garage.  Some people will put a storage shed in the back yard, run electricity to it and use that as their office. Regardless of how you do it, you need a separate space for work in order to keep your sanity.

photo credit

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• working from home tips (113)
• work from home tips (86)
• work at home tips (52)
• work at home (16)
• Work From Home (13)
• work from home secrets (5)
• how to find job at home secrets (1)
• work at home secrets (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Tips for Taxes
• Setting up a Home Office
• Working From Home
• Reader Question – Working from Home
• Share Your Answer – Tips for a Home Office

Aviation safety

Our public aviation security in the US is based around the idea of keeping bad stuff off airplanes.  The idea is that if we can keep anything dangerous off planes, we will be safe.  Lots of problem solving effort has gone into keeping dangerous stuff off planes, but is that the real problem?  There is stuff all over in a plane that could potentially be dangerous.  I’m not going to try to give people any ideas here, but trust me there are many MANY items already on a plane that are far more dangerous than the pieces of plastic the 9/11 hijackers used. So what is the real problem?  We need to keep terrorists off planes.  It is going to be impossible to keep all the bad stuff off planes–particularly when some of the things that could be dangerous are part of the planes safety mechanisms. But if we can keep terrorists off planes then it doesn’t really matter what is on the plane.

Keeping specific types of people out of the air isn’t as easy as making knee jerk reactions to ban random stuff but it isn’t impossible and it is much safer.  Israel seems to do a pretty good job of this–they don’t let you on the plane until they are convinced that you aren’t a terrorist.  They still check baggage and stuff like that, but they are trying to solve a different problem than we are trying to solve in the US.  They want to keep terrorists of planes.  The US wants to keep tools a terrorist could use off planes. How you identify the problem determines to a great extent what type of solution you will achieve.

Foreign aid

When it comes to countries where people don’t have enough to eat, governments and charitable organizations often go in and do problem solving on the issue of”People don’t have enough food.”  Of course the solution to that problem is simple–send food.  In many instances it doesn’t help very much because the food is thrown away because of local superstitions or stolen or left to rot because of inadequate distribution and red tape. Worse still, giving away food often causes bigger problems.

Most people understand that giving food to wild animals can do a lot of harm.  If an eagle gets accustomed to being given fish by a human, he may lose the desire and skill of hunting for himself.  This can happen to people as well.

What incentive does a farmer in Africa have to work hard to raise a crop, when he knows his inferior foods will be in competition with what some foreign charity is giving away for free near the market? Giving away free food can kill any self sufficiency that may exist.  The free food might temporarily keep people from being hungry, but when war or politics drive out the people who are giving aid, the people are left in a worse position than they were before because they are less self-sufficient on local resources.

When it comes to helping people who are starving in foreign countries, the problem must be defined as “how do we help them become self-sufficient?” I’m not saying that you should never give away food, but it has to be done very carefully in much the same way that doctors may prescribe addictive drugs as pain killers for extremely sick patients.

I talked with someone from the United Nations who explained that his job was to go in and try to find way to help people without causing more harm.  He said that many times, giving people the ability to own property by establishing banks and loan programs could reverse poverty in an area and create a self-sufficient ecosystem while having the fewest negative side effects.

Autos and the Environment

When it comes to pollution from cars, the obvious problem is: How can we make cars that produce less pollution in manufacturing and produce less pollution while driving? Hybrid vehicles are not the solution to this problem.  Hybrid vehicles solve the following problem: “How can we make a car that people will pay more for because they think they are helping the environment and/or saving on fuel?”  The car I drove in high-school and college required less pollution to make and got significantly better gas mileage than the current hybrid cars.  Hybrids solve a marketing problem more than they solve the pollution problem. The pollution problem will be better solved with vehicles that are simple to make and inexpensive to propel.  A car with both an electric and a gasoline drive system is going to require many many more components and much more mining of copper and nickle than a simple efficient gasoline vehicle.  If a hybrid vehicle costs more than an equivalent non-hybrid vehicle it is probably because there is more involved in its manufacture and it contains parts that aren’t required in the plain version.  The additional manufacturing and additional parts are all going to add pollution.

The smart choice for a strictly environmental perspective is going to be getting a used vehicle that can get 50 MPH.  That’s better mileage than you’ll get with a hybrid AND you skip all the pollution of making a new vehicle.

Kids and self-esteem

Somewhere someone has decided that kids have problems with self-esteem.  According to research that I’ve seen, this isn’t as much of an issue in the US.  Kids in the US think they are very good a math and science.  A study confirmed that most US kids feel they are better than other people at math and science.  The problem is that they aren’t. They have the self-esteem, but not the skills.

Anyway, the people are trying to solve the “self esteem problem” have decided that they need to lower the passing scores on tests to 40% so kids can all feel good about passing and don’t have to experience failure. It seems to me that school would be a good place to learn from your mistakes so you don’t have to encounter that type of education on the job for the first time, but I guess that is the view of someone with real world experience and not as many hours of child psychology classes.

So back to what they are trying to solve.  Is it really a problem that kids don’t have good self esteem? Maybe.  Maybe not.  But I can guarantee you this: Poor self esteem isn’t caused by tests being too hard. If you want to give kids self esteem, give them things to do that if they work hard they can succeed at.  The problem is not that public school education is too rigorous, yet that is the problem they are trying to solve.

Welfare

Welfare used to try to solve the problem of “How can we give these people jobs?”  WPA projects started around the time of the Great Depression built a nearby lake, the highschool football stadium, and the cement picnic tables at a local park. In a nearby town, they hired people to go down the brick streets and flip each brick over.  It looked a bit nicer, but it wasn’t really something that had to be done.  The point was it gave people work for which they were paid.  They could take their paycheck and buy food for their family.

Much of the welfare we see today tries to solve a different problem.  “How can we give these people money?”  This is a completely different problem that is solved in a completely different way.  Trying to give people jobs helped foster a sense of self reliance.  When other higher paying jobs became available it was easy for these people to transition to other work.  Trying to just give people money creates as many problems as it solves.

I can see the need for unemployment, but I think it is horrible that you can sit at home and get an unemployment check.  At the very least you should be required to spend 10 to 20 hours a week doing some type of public service work in exchange for the money you are getting. I think you’d see a significant drop in the number of people claiming unemployment if it still required some type of work. Work is a great way to weed out people who are simply taking advantage of the system and keep the benefits focused on people who it is actually helping as they try to find another job.

Conclusion

My point was to show that we often try to solve the wrong problems and put a tremendous amount of effort in to fixing the wrong things. If your car doesn’t drive well because the wheels need aligned, you can change the oil all you want with out fixing the real issue. When you are trying to solve problems, make sure you don’t jump so quickly to the solution stage, that you skip the part where you identify the actual problem that needs solved.

photo credit car
photo credit airport

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• solving the wrong problem (45)
• Tell me about a time when you were faced with a difficult or complex loan What type of resources did you use? (17)
• solving the wrong problem example (4)
• solution into solving a problem on the plane (2)
• ways to solve abortion (1)
• system security wrong problem solving (1)
• solving the wrong problems (1)
• solving problem sample (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Worry vs. Problem-solving
• Fire (or keep) the Workaholics
• Recommended Book
• Being Wrong vs. Doing Nothing
• The Difficult Things