Entries For: February 2008
2008-02-26
Conventional Wisdom II
Week before last I wrote about how I see conventional wisdom around the non-profit sector changing, and I definitely think that is the case. There are still a lot of nuggets of "conventional wisdom" that aren't necessarily that wise. Some exist in the non-profit world alone, but most exist in the for profit world as well.
Trivially, people continue to believe - and teach - that you should put two spaces after a period. There are now adults who have never used a typewriter, because they grew up with computers and word processing software that spaces type appropriately, and yet they were still taught "two spaces" after every period. It is interesting to me that paragraph indents have disappeared on the internet, and people have adjusted quickly to that, but two spaces after a period? Might as well ask people to give up eating desserts for all the trouble it causes.
Throughout history, we have developed technological innovations with limits that have been fixed or improved upon in further iterations only to have the original, limiting implementation remain the standard bearer. The most painfully obvious one is the QWERTY keyboard layout most of us interact with on a near daily basis. Originally, it was developed to slow people down so that the keys didn't stick together. More than 100 years later, and despite better designed keyboards being available, we continue to hunt and peck our way to carpal tunnel syndrome on the older, accepted, inferior design.
One of the corporate catch phrases that has followed me around for years is "above the fold." This made sense back in the days when print was king, and getting something "above the fold" of a newspaper really was important. Monitors don't fold. They have different resolutions, so what is above the fold on one is not necessarily the same on another. A device like the iPhone throws another wrinkle into the mix. How do you place your content or your advertising "above the fold" on a device that is tiny, and varies the resolution of the page you see? And as it turns out, if you want your advertising to be effective, "above the fold" might not be all that it's cracked up to be anyway, but people cling to what they know, even when things change and what they know is irrelevant.
Eventually, conventional wisdom catches up with technology, or vice versa. It adjusts the space after a period so that it doesn't matter if you put on or two spaces there, the result is the same. Indents, a casualty of early html limitations, are poised to make a return. "Above the fold" will fall by the wayside as page rankings, click throughs and other more relevant benchmarks take precedence.
What worked yesterday, what stopped working last week, what will work tomorrow - some, all or none of it will be relevant soon. In an ever changing world, it can be hard to keep up. The most important thing is to not waste time on things that used to work instead of applying new methods to accomplish the same thing better, faster or both.
Trivially, people continue to believe - and teach - that you should put two spaces after a period. There are now adults who have never used a typewriter, because they grew up with computers and word processing software that spaces type appropriately, and yet they were still taught "two spaces" after every period. It is interesting to me that paragraph indents have disappeared on the internet, and people have adjusted quickly to that, but two spaces after a period? Might as well ask people to give up eating desserts for all the trouble it causes.
Throughout history, we have developed technological innovations with limits that have been fixed or improved upon in further iterations only to have the original, limiting implementation remain the standard bearer. The most painfully obvious one is the QWERTY keyboard layout most of us interact with on a near daily basis. Originally, it was developed to slow people down so that the keys didn't stick together. More than 100 years later, and despite better designed keyboards being available, we continue to hunt and peck our way to carpal tunnel syndrome on the older, accepted, inferior design.
One of the corporate catch phrases that has followed me around for years is "above the fold." This made sense back in the days when print was king, and getting something "above the fold" of a newspaper really was important. Monitors don't fold. They have different resolutions, so what is above the fold on one is not necessarily the same on another. A device like the iPhone throws another wrinkle into the mix. How do you place your content or your advertising "above the fold" on a device that is tiny, and varies the resolution of the page you see? And as it turns out, if you want your advertising to be effective, "above the fold" might not be all that it's cracked up to be anyway, but people cling to what they know, even when things change and what they know is irrelevant.
Eventually, conventional wisdom catches up with technology, or vice versa. It adjusts the space after a period so that it doesn't matter if you put on or two spaces there, the result is the same. Indents, a casualty of early html limitations, are poised to make a return. "Above the fold" will fall by the wayside as page rankings, click throughs and other more relevant benchmarks take precedence.
What worked yesterday, what stopped working last week, what will work tomorrow - some, all or none of it will be relevant soon. In an ever changing world, it can be hard to keep up. The most important thing is to not waste time on things that used to work instead of applying new methods to accomplish the same thing better, faster or both.
2008-02-19
Saving Time vs. Saving Money
Over in the discussions section, I'm hosting an event about Tech Solutions on a Shoestring this week. After writing the intro, I got to thinking about the difference between saving time vs. saving money on technology. Sometimes, spending more money buys you more time and the investment pays off. I feel that way about Apple's Macintosh computers which are ostensibly more expensive up front, but include cost savings over the long run. I bought a new desktop at home to replace my previous one - which has been running pretty much non-stop since February of 2000. It runs fine still, it just doesn't have the juice to run Leopard/Mac OS X 10.5, so I'm turning it into a back-up file server. The extra money that I spend on Macs pays off as a result of their longer life expectancy vs. PCs.
But that's not the only reason I predominantly use Macs. I don't like to waste time fiddling with computers when I could be using them to do the tasks I bought them for in the first place. My time is too valuable to me to spend time dealing with malware, spyware and viruses the way I used to when my time was split more evenly between Windows and Macintosh. This isn't, however, a post about converting PC users over to Apple users. It's just an example of an instance where saving time is more important than saving money.
Saving time is what we really expect from technology, and all too often, we're left feeling like we're losing time to our gizmos, computers and cell phones. Some of it is the fault of quirky software or unreliable hardware, I'll give you that. Every time Adobe's update software kicks on I try to cancel it as fast as I can so that it doesn't interfere with the work I'm trying to get done. Sometimes, I catch it and stop it before it wreaks havoc on my system, sometimes it runs peacefully and uneventfully in the background and sometimes it leaves me staring at the Mac's dreaded rainbow ball of "I'm too busy to do what you're asking, please hold the line."
(In writing that last little bit, I realized that I don't have to put up with that kind of behavior, and have now turned automatic updates off. A simple solution that will save me time later on.)
How we approach technology, however, is sometimes a much bigger time killer than it needs to be. Email is the most obvious example, and there are a lot of people out there have advice on how to spend less time in your inbox. It's starting to happen with social networks too, as the college crowds that lived in FaceBook when it launched start to head out into the real world, with the real time constraints that jobs and other obligations demand.
Not that email and social networks don't have their places. Twitter, to those that don't get it, can seem like an awful waste of time. With a bit of thought, it can become an invaluable aid. If you are using a tool and aren't getting much benefit out of it, stop using it. Are you in the business of being cool? Not many of us are. Forget about trying to keep up and instead, stick with what works.
This isn't a new conundrum either. I used to deal with GANTT charts a lot. People would produce them, I would produce them, we'd deliberate over them - and I found it to be an extreme waste of time. My work was always at the tail end of the projects, and the timelines were always a waste for me to review because they would change so often before I got my hands on things that I wasted countless hours prepping to do things properly only to get handed the work two weeks late. The only date that never changed? The deadline. So I stopped paying attention to GANTT charts, freed up a whole bunch of time and was a lot more productive.
Figure out what the biggest waste of time in your day to day existence is and then eliminate it. If that means only checking email twice a day, do it. Quitting your instant messenger client? Fairly easy. Ringtones can save you time too. Assign them to the people you absolutely have to talk to in case of emergency, and then ignore the rest. I rarely answer my home phone anymore, because people that call me there usually want to sell me something, a waste of time for them and me. There's a great scene in The Accidental Tourist where the phone is ringing and nobody who lives in the house is answering it - much to the consternation of a guest who just can't comprehend not answering a ringing phone.
Be it a ringing phone, a chiming inbox or a dinging IM alert, ask yourself - am I really being productive? If the answer isn't a resounding yes, ignore it. Put that time to better use.
But that's not the only reason I predominantly use Macs. I don't like to waste time fiddling with computers when I could be using them to do the tasks I bought them for in the first place. My time is too valuable to me to spend time dealing with malware, spyware and viruses the way I used to when my time was split more evenly between Windows and Macintosh. This isn't, however, a post about converting PC users over to Apple users. It's just an example of an instance where saving time is more important than saving money.
Saving time is what we really expect from technology, and all too often, we're left feeling like we're losing time to our gizmos, computers and cell phones. Some of it is the fault of quirky software or unreliable hardware, I'll give you that. Every time Adobe's update software kicks on I try to cancel it as fast as I can so that it doesn't interfere with the work I'm trying to get done. Sometimes, I catch it and stop it before it wreaks havoc on my system, sometimes it runs peacefully and uneventfully in the background and sometimes it leaves me staring at the Mac's dreaded rainbow ball of "I'm too busy to do what you're asking, please hold the line."
(In writing that last little bit, I realized that I don't have to put up with that kind of behavior, and have now turned automatic updates off. A simple solution that will save me time later on.)
How we approach technology, however, is sometimes a much bigger time killer than it needs to be. Email is the most obvious example, and there are a lot of people out there have advice on how to spend less time in your inbox. It's starting to happen with social networks too, as the college crowds that lived in FaceBook when it launched start to head out into the real world, with the real time constraints that jobs and other obligations demand.
Not that email and social networks don't have their places. Twitter, to those that don't get it, can seem like an awful waste of time. With a bit of thought, it can become an invaluable aid. If you are using a tool and aren't getting much benefit out of it, stop using it. Are you in the business of being cool? Not many of us are. Forget about trying to keep up and instead, stick with what works.
This isn't a new conundrum either. I used to deal with GANTT charts a lot. People would produce them, I would produce them, we'd deliberate over them - and I found it to be an extreme waste of time. My work was always at the tail end of the projects, and the timelines were always a waste for me to review because they would change so often before I got my hands on things that I wasted countless hours prepping to do things properly only to get handed the work two weeks late. The only date that never changed? The deadline. So I stopped paying attention to GANTT charts, freed up a whole bunch of time and was a lot more productive.
Figure out what the biggest waste of time in your day to day existence is and then eliminate it. If that means only checking email twice a day, do it. Quitting your instant messenger client? Fairly easy. Ringtones can save you time too. Assign them to the people you absolutely have to talk to in case of emergency, and then ignore the rest. I rarely answer my home phone anymore, because people that call me there usually want to sell me something, a waste of time for them and me. There's a great scene in The Accidental Tourist where the phone is ringing and nobody who lives in the house is answering it - much to the consternation of a guest who just can't comprehend not answering a ringing phone.
Be it a ringing phone, a chiming inbox or a dinging IM alert, ask yourself - am I really being productive? If the answer isn't a resounding yes, ignore it. Put that time to better use.
2008-02-13
Conventional Wisdom
Filed Under:
Is it just me, or is the conventional wisdom about what has value in the world been shifting? I was in an airport in Chicago recently where the bookstore had Muhammad Yunus' latest book, Creating a World Without Poverty, as it's most prominently featured title. This was after I had seen an article about him in the in-flight magazine on LAN Air. Then I saw him on The Colbert Report:
What does it say about us that amidst all of the clutter that qualifies as news and entertainment in our media, that a microfinance banker from Bangladesh is capturing the attention of so many?
Yesterday, Guy Kawasaki blogged about the cleverest idea he'd seen in years. The iPhone? Nope. The MacBook Air? Android? Microsoft buying Yahoo!? Zune no longer being available in brown? Nope. PlayPumps. He's also recently interviewed David Bornstein. When your mainstream business gurus start taking note of what social entrepreneurs are doing, something is definitely afoot.
Attitudes on the environment are changing too. Seth Godin blogged today about how his changing view on the environment shapes two recent consumer experiences he's had. Can this kind of thinking lead to changes in how companies package their products? Apple is touting how much they've reduced the packaging for the MacBook Air. Will other companies follow suit?
Robert Kennedy guest blogged on Google's corporate blog about ILoveMountains.org and how it uses Google Earth and Google Maps. Granted, it's good PR, but they're doing it nonetheless.
So is the conventional wisdom changing? Or will we still be dealing with these issues from the same place we are today thirty years on?
What does it say about us that amidst all of the clutter that qualifies as news and entertainment in our media, that a microfinance banker from Bangladesh is capturing the attention of so many?
Yesterday, Guy Kawasaki blogged about the cleverest idea he'd seen in years. The iPhone? Nope. The MacBook Air? Android? Microsoft buying Yahoo!? Zune no longer being available in brown? Nope. PlayPumps. He's also recently interviewed David Bornstein. When your mainstream business gurus start taking note of what social entrepreneurs are doing, something is definitely afoot.
Attitudes on the environment are changing too. Seth Godin blogged today about how his changing view on the environment shapes two recent consumer experiences he's had. Can this kind of thinking lead to changes in how companies package their products? Apple is touting how much they've reduced the packaging for the MacBook Air. Will other companies follow suit?
Robert Kennedy guest blogged on Google's corporate blog about ILoveMountains.org and how it uses Google Earth and Google Maps. Granted, it's good PR, but they're doing it nonetheless.
So is the conventional wisdom changing? Or will we still be dealing with these issues from the same place we are today thirty years on?
2008-02-05
Technology Stinks
Yes, I'm supposed to love technology. But sometimes, there's just no getting around the fact that most technology is flawed, and can ruin your day. It can be hard at these times to remember all of the efficiencies and pleasures that can result from a well executed piece of code or an elegantly designed piece of hardware. All you really want to do is find the person responsible for the malformed code or curious design decision that has led to you losing precious time and/or sleep trying to figure out why something is broken when there's no good reason for it to have stopped working in the first place.
We've been experiencing a technological malaise, if you will, around the Social Edge World Headquarters. Don't believe me? Just ask Global X. Yesterday we weren't able to access the site from inside our office and resorted to working at a coffee shop briefly. A couple of weeks ago I was working from a coffee shop while attending Macworld and couldn't get the wifi to stay connected for more than 3 or 4 minutes at a time.
Oh, and you know what happens when a whole bunch of Mac geeks and their iPhones all converge in one spot and try to access the web all at the same time? A lot of that traffic doesn't make it through. I actually had to resort to using my iPhone as a phone for most of the week. Depressing, but not unexpected.
What does one do when technology fails to meet our ever greater expectations? Really, there's no need to get all riled up when Bad Technology Happens To Good Users. Laugh. Blow it off. Take a deep breath and sing a song. Better yet, recite cheesy disco lyrics as poetry, as if you are auditioning for a part on Masterpiece Theatre. 'I say, old chap, I will survive. As long as I know how to love I know I will survive."
There, doesn't that feel better?
Really, there's no need to get all discombobulated about it. The problem might be your fault, it might not be. It could be the fault of the person or company who makes you long for the days when high tech meant a really neat digital watch, or maybe nobody is to blame at all. It doesn't matter, it will pass, and you'll just feel silly if you blow it all out of proportion.
I say this in spite of having recently quashing the desire to unplug every electronic device within reach and just enjoying the silence of a world without hard drive and computer fans and their constant yet futile whirring.
More than likely, it's not your fault, or their fault or even his or her fault. Even if it is, roll with it. You'll be better equipped to come up with a solution if you keep a cool head.
We've been experiencing a technological malaise, if you will, around the Social Edge World Headquarters. Don't believe me? Just ask Global X. Yesterday we weren't able to access the site from inside our office and resorted to working at a coffee shop briefly. A couple of weeks ago I was working from a coffee shop while attending Macworld and couldn't get the wifi to stay connected for more than 3 or 4 minutes at a time.
Oh, and you know what happens when a whole bunch of Mac geeks and their iPhones all converge in one spot and try to access the web all at the same time? A lot of that traffic doesn't make it through. I actually had to resort to using my iPhone as a phone for most of the week. Depressing, but not unexpected.
What does one do when technology fails to meet our ever greater expectations? Really, there's no need to get all riled up when Bad Technology Happens To Good Users. Laugh. Blow it off. Take a deep breath and sing a song. Better yet, recite cheesy disco lyrics as poetry, as if you are auditioning for a part on Masterpiece Theatre. 'I say, old chap, I will survive. As long as I know how to love I know I will survive."
There, doesn't that feel better?
Really, there's no need to get all discombobulated about it. The problem might be your fault, it might not be. It could be the fault of the person or company who makes you long for the days when high tech meant a really neat digital watch, or maybe nobody is to blame at all. It doesn't matter, it will pass, and you'll just feel silly if you blow it all out of proportion.
I say this in spite of having recently quashing the desire to unplug every electronic device within reach and just enjoying the silence of a world without hard drive and computer fans and their constant yet futile whirring.
More than likely, it's not your fault, or their fault or even his or her fault. Even if it is, roll with it. You'll be better equipped to come up with a solution if you keep a cool head.
