Simple Timesaver

When you need new socks, get rid of all the old ones and just buy all the same type.  It is much easier to match if all of the white socks match each other and all of your dark socks match each other.

Six Tips for Eating Out Frugally

Most of the time, people go out to eat, not just for the food, but for social and entertainment purposes. These six suggestions will help you get the experience at a “discount”.

1. Order water - In the US, you’ll usually pay $1 to $3 for a soft drink with your meal. Water is healthier and can often reduce the cost of your meal by 10% to 20%.
2. Go out for lunch - Many places charge more for the evening meal than for lunch. Sometimes the evening portions are bigger, but this isn’t always the case. If you go out for lunch you’ll often save 35% to 50% on your meal. (This seems to be particularly true for Chinese restaurants.)
3. Go out just for dessert - Eating at home and going out for dessert can be a good option if you are just wanting to get out of the house. One advantage of this is that you can splurge and get something fancy without completely blowing your budget.
4. Take home leftovers - If the money you paid for one meal feeds you twice, you’ve made it much more cost effective.
5. Order toward the low end - Many times a $12 entree and a $35 entree don’t differ substantially in quality of taste. Most of the time the more expensive items simply reflect the additional cost of bringing in food from outside the country. However, restaurants will sometimes mark up an item more just to get a nice range of prices–someone will order the more expensive products thinking it is better.
6. Share an Entree - In most US restaurants the food portions are enormous. Sharing an entree can be a good way to keep the cost down and eat portions that are more healthy. My wife and I have found that in most places we have to share an entree in order to have any room left for desert.

Simple Tip

When buying electronics, try to get items that can be charged using a standard USB cable. It makes it a lot easier to travel when one charger fits multiple devices.

Breaking the Internet

I just saw a video where someone explained that typing Google into Google can “break the internet”.   I sent the link to my dad and then went and tried it at Google.  I immediately (I’m not joking) got a message from my remote executive assistant saying that her internet was down.  I think I broke the internet in India.  Sorry about that everyone.

Excellence - Perfection vs. Efficiency

I use to work for an organization that put a lot of emphasis on “excellence”. This sounds like a good thing, but it was very poorly defined and tended to become an excuse for wreaking mayhem with the budget. Spending 100% more for a 10% gain toward perfection didn’t seem like what I would define as excellence.

As I thought I about it, I realized the the problem  stemmed from equating excellence with perfection. Excellence is actually made up of more than one dimension. Perfection is one of those dimensions, but you must have another dimension that recognizes we are dealing with finite resources. Usually this is best represented as cost in monetary terms, but it could also represent time and how efficiently we convert that time or money into perfection. This chart shows how the two dimensions together represent excellence.

If you achieve perfection without any control of the expense, you will end up with waste. This takes you out of the green excellence zone. If you only focus on keeping your costs down without any focus on perfection, you will produce shoddy work.

Excellence comes from balancing efficiency with perfection. Basically it comes down to doing the best with what you are given. If you are given a million dollar budget for a project, the amount of perfection should reflect the large investment. If you are given $10,000 for a project, you should still be able to stay in the green zone by making the most efficient use of your resources as possible.

Taking the time to reflect on your work and determining which zone your results belong in can be a valuable exercise.

Here are some questions to ask yourself about your current projects:

1. If I cut costs by 25% how much will it hurt the project? If cutting costs by 25% would have a minimal impact on the project, you may be operating in the waste zone.
2. If I were to increase spending (time or money) by 10% would it result in a better end result? If the end result is 200% better, you may want to try to allocate additional resources or funds to the project.
3. Can I get a better product without spending more? Most projects have a certain amount of unnecessary waste. If you can trim that part and apply it toward other areas, you may be able to increase the excellence without actually spending any more time or money.

Plaxo Question

Has anyone found a good way to sync Plaxo (an online addressbook) with a Blackberry over the air?  Any ideas or suggestions would be helpful.

Interviews

I’ve been busy working on a new set of interviews with over 100 different people.  I’m pretty excited about how this is turning out.  We’ll have some more on this late on the week.

Reader Question - Organized Work Desk

How should I organize my desk at work

1. Get a file cabinet. Most of the junk on a work desks is paper that should be filed. Take the time to setup a reasonable filing system and then commit to keeping your papers stored in the file cabinet.
2. Limit your personal clutter. A family picture or two is fine, but 20 framed photos, three baseballs, 2 snowglobes, and 4 unidentified objects is a bit excessive. Keep your extra stuff at home.
3. Don’t use your desktop for storage. If you need additional storage space, get some boxes you can put on the shelf or a cabinet of drawers. If you use the top of your desk for storage it will quickly accumulate many more items.
4. Route your wires. Computer and phone cables can account for much of the clutter on a typical desk. Taking 30 minutes to route your wires can go a long ways toward keeping things neat.
5. Think about cleaning. If you can arrange your furniture so the janitor will have an easy time vacuuming, you’ll probably have a cleaner office area.
6. Set aside time to organize. Good organization doesn’t happen on accident. Set aside time to organize every few months and make basic maintenance organization part of your daily routine.
7. Keep cleaning supplies nearby. If you can keep a bottle of glass cleaner and paper towels in your office it will be a lot easier to keep things clean than if you have to go to a closet somewhere to get supplies. Make it easy to keep things clean.
8. Think “where will I find it”. When organizing, don’t ask yourself where to put something. Ask yourself where you will look for it. Organizing should be done so you can locate everything you need quickly. If you just focus on finding a place for things, you may put them in places where it will be difficult to locate them later.

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Vote!

As I mentioned before, we are doing a series of interviews for Productivity501.  However to help make things a bit more interactive, I’d like some help in determining which tips are the best.  If you have a few minutes take a look at this question and answers about the most useful gadget.

You’ll see two answers.  Simply click on the vote button for the one you think is the best answer.  You can do this as many times as you like.  Once we get a number of votes, we’ll publish the results.

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