Simplicity

“How come my car is so much larger than my camera, but my camera’s manual is thicker than my car’s manual”.
- John Maeda MIT Professor

SPECIAL THINKING DAYS

Friday afternoon you feel different since Saturday is a special day. Many groups have special days and they look forward to have them. The concept here is the same, to create special days that increase productivity and enrich your life.

1. SMALL PROJECTS DAYS

Many of us have tasks and projects that they mean to start but don’t for various reasons. Often something unattractive mandate or meetings get in the way. However, on this day we break through by committing ourselves to spend a short specified amount of time 2 hours per pair on doing interesting stuff. On that day we say “No” to meetings – email or any other things to get things done.

2. LEARNING DAYS

Whatever your potential is - you become better through learning, study and practice. It would be a great day to design new tools like inventing a new game for learning the business. On this day you can learn a new skill, new programming language, crafting a new screen you always wanted for administrating your shared files, etc.

3. GETTING THINGS DONE DAYS

On these days your mood is clearing clutters. No email review when you start your machine and allocate time for reading emails same way C programmers do for allocating arrays [1024]. Read email at 10, 2 and 4. Reinforce the habit of making a small to do list of 4 things on a sticky or index card. Set short deadline for each activity and do one thing at a time (multitasking is evil).

4. POSITVE ACTION DAYS

On these days you invest time and energy to help others. Positive actions create a permanent effect of team work and long lasting friendship.

5. CLEAN UP DAYS

Increasingly we seem to spend our lives rushing around with stressful meetings, phony deadlines and many other things passes easily through our firewall. One consequence is failure to extract the full value that every moment offers and emotional bankruptcy. On these days you make “no” the default answer for new tasks, meetings, and other demands. Those things should wait and earn their way into the attention field. On these days you don’t review your email when your day or machine starts. Morning is yours, afternoons you can spend time with your teammate to refactor that piece of a code that make you feel unclean. You delete emails, trash documents and turn off your phones.

6. TRY SOMETHING NEW DAYS

It is very easy to become entrenched in the same habits and get used to your daily habits. There is always stuff in the horizon with the potential to enrich our lives – we just have to be willing to seek them out. On Try Something New Days start trying different kind of food (spray coffee powder on your pasta – it is great), talk with different kind of people, go visiting somewhere you’ve never been. Write a utility you always wanted in new language. (I am not qualified on many of these items, as I am too lazy to go to new places or do some of the aforementioned items; however I believe in trying new things. I have tried the grounded coffee on pasta and can’t eat pasta without it ever since).

7. WORK FROM HOME DAYS

On working from home days we get into the creativity zone and purposely engage our brain into thinking of “possibilities”. Your mode will change and you can perform better at work when you have these days (pauses).

Learning from monkeys

NP told me that monkeys peel bananas at the ‘wrong’ end. I have tried it and it seems peeling is easier and actually banana taste better.
Are there more possibilities at your daily routine that can benefit from this principle? XPers tests before writing code, Dell sells computers before making them…

Fail over

There is a joke (by De Bono) about the airline pilot who apologized to the passengers for having to shut down one engine. He explained that it meant they would arrive two hours late into New York. A second engine failed and he explained that they would be four hours late. Then a third engine failed. At this point the co-pilot leaned across to him and said:” I hope to goodness the last engine doesn't fail or we shall be up here all night!"

Welcome to feedback culture

Smart customers know that projects are done by a step by step process, not an event.
Instead of this:
Request ---> Complain
It works like this:
Request---> sample ---> ask for feedback ---> learning ---> more sample ---> accept ---> relationship

Who says we need our logo on every slide?

Garr Reynolds says: “The logo won’t help make a sell or make a point, but the clutter it brings does add unnecessary noise and makes the presentation visuals look like a commercial. And people hate commercials or being sold to. We don’t begin every new sentence in a conversation by re-stating our name, why do we bombard people with our company logo in every slide?”

He also shows a clip of Lewis Black appearing on CNN and getting fed up with the extraneous graphics on the display. Fun to watch: