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Prepare for Perpetual Technology Upgrade Mode: Lifetime Learning With an Attitude
Do you find yourself spending more and more time trying to keep up with the constant stream of technology upgrades and the fallout they create? I do. Here’s a small sampling from last week. I finally upgraded my Mac operating system because it is supposed to be “more secure.” In the process, the OS upgrade “broke”…
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The Power of Persistently Pointless Processes: Have You Balanced Your Checkbook Lately?
Technology historians routinely point to examples of legacy hardware design driving new products in odd ways. This “path dependence” is often cited as a barrier to innovation and the cause of long-term inefficiency. The layout of the letters on your keyboard is a common example. This so-called QWERTY keyboard layout originally designed for typewriters is…
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Don’t Accept the Defaults! What Are You Doing to Customize Your Life?
Most technology is designed to be “feature rich.” This means that there are multiple menus and multiple ways to do everything. In short, it means you won’t use 80% of the capabilities and it would take forever to figure them out anyway. The way most designers deal with the “feature rich” problem is that they…
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The Art of Yak Shaving Revisited
A while ago, my son Teague introduced me to the concept of “yak shaving.” If you do a web search you get a few definitions which are variations on a theme. They boil down to something like “activities you find yourself doing which appear unrelated to the objective you started out with but which, in fact, are…
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Five Steps to Meaningful Giving: Maybe It’s Time To Channel Your Inner Scrooge
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Two Strategies for Enjoying the World Beyond Broadcast Television
We bought a TiVo with a lifetime subscription the day they went on the market 15 years ago. When friends asked how we liked it, I said, “we are spending a lot less time watching a lot more good television.” There were no more missed episodes of family favorites. We became experts at fast forwarding…
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Three Secrets to Making an Impact: Pipelines, Timing and Exploring the “Adjacent Possible”
1. Prepare your pipeline of possible projects. I had a colleague once who explained to me that every year her boss told her that the organization’s priorities for funding had changed and that they would be looking for projects in other parts of the business to develop and promote. She should scale back her program. She smiled…
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A Secret to Special Relationships – Cultivating Ordinary Time
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What Your Old Computer Can Teach You About the Importance of Taking a Vacation
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Three Keys to the Successful Launch of a New Employee that I Learned Baling Hay