How much time am I prepared to spend working. Within that, what’s the most important thing I need to do, and how much time should I commit to doing it. Iterate until time is accounted for. Of course in the real world that needs to take account of other people’s needs and preferences – but it also leads pretty forcibly to the conclusion that responding to every clamour for attention from emails and meetings is a rapid route to perdition.
Government doesn’t find conversation easy. Its communication models tend to be predominantly one to many and it finds the megaphone more comfortable than the ear trumpet.
Twenty years ago, I had a problem to solve. A museum was creating a database of the objects it held and needed to be able to produce reports in catalogue number order. The difficulty was that different numbering systems had been used at different times and catalogues with different numbering systems had been amalgamated without [...]
After an afternoon spent confronting an application from which the third panel could be a screen shot, this rings horribly true. Even better, in a deeply perverse kind of way, than the wry smile the cartoon prompts, are the 135 comments it has provoked on the post where it first appeared. The amount of passion [...]
Chris Anderson has two network cables: On my desk at work I have two ethernet cables. One is black and one is white. The black one is connected to our corporate network. I use that one when I want to print things. I could also use it for Internet access and stuff, but I don’t [...]
From The Economist, 19 December 2002 (accessible here, but you probably need a subscription to read the whole thing): Knowledge workers take notes not in order to store information, but because the process of note-taking helps them to learn. Once taken, notes are rarely reviewed. According to a study of research workers reported in “The Technology of Team [...]
Four years ago pretty much to the day, on 5 August 2003, I bought at 64Mb data stick for £28.99. A bit less than two years ago – on 15 November 2005, I bought a 1Gb data stick for £35.99 . Today, exactly the same 1Gb data stick is available for £7.99. * Cost per [...]
Let’s just get this confession over with: My in box is not empty. At the moment, it contains 16,694 messages. Once, I suppose, my in box must have had a zero message count — maybe back in 1991, when I got my first e-mail account. It has not seen zero since. Yet I do not struggle to empty [...]
John Pederson – of whom I had never heard until this graph caught my eye – makes an interesting point about schools. But what he says seems just as relevant to other ponderous organisations, such as government departments. It doesn’t matter how much <Insert School District Here> grows (or plans to grow) over 5 years [...]
My new printer is looking after me better than I could dream of looking after myself. In all the years since Windows 3.1, I think it’s the first time I have seen this particular gem.