Work-Life Innovation |

Hi Guys,

I’m going to be in LA, San Francisco and San Diego from the 19th of December until New Years Day! If any of you guys who read my blog want to meet up for drinks, that would be so cool!

If so, you can send contact details to…

jevets01@gmail.com.

Let the good times roll! Dood!

Read the rest of this entry »

“Hey Steve, want to go for a drink?” “Uh, no thanks. I’m tired and I have some work to do anyway. Sorry!”

“Hey, we are having a get together next week, you should come!” “Oh, sorry, I can’t, I’m er, …busy that day.” “But I haven’t told you which day its happening!”  “Well, I mean I’m busy all week, I don’t think I could make it, I’m really sorry”

“Steve, we are going to London on Saturday for a day out. You should come”
“Ahh, I think there’s something I have to do Saturday, I just can’t remember what it is right now. Can I let you know later in the week? Cheers”

Ever found yourself saying any of the above? Of course you have, everyone gets invited to things they don’t want to or can’t attend for one reason or another. What’s more troubling however are those times when you find yourself taking a rain check when you have no real good reason to.

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Fuck It!

I like these two word a lot. I especially like the first word (who doesn’t?), but I like Fuck It in particular when they join forces - oh and I love it when they come with the exclamation mark!

I like Fuck It! because amongst other things Fuck It! represents an almighty letting go of what we had previously been clinging on to so tightly - typically in the face of overwhelming evidence that we are wrong about the Way Things Are. Notice I capitalised that last phrase, and I did so deliberately. It deserve capitalisation because The Way Things Are is pretty fucking fundamental. You can’t argue with The Way Things Are, it just is that way. Sure, things will change and the Way Things Are right now will become the way things were (deliberately uncapitalised), but the Way Things Are will still be, well, The Way Things Are!  You had better get used to it, because it’s all you have to work with. Fuck It! can help you to see that - actually Fuck It! is pretty much all you can say when you do see that!

The other reason I like the phrase Fuck It! is because it represents a Read the rest of this entry »

How to make the world a better place? You could form a charity, or dedicate your life to finding a cure for cancer. Perhaps, organise or attend rallies to world peace. Maybe you could lobby your political representative to get us out of Iraq. All of these are great steps you can take to make the world a better place. But there’s also a bunch of simpler stuff we can all do. Easy, spontaneous small actions that we can take to improve the day of the people around us. A wonderful little book by Danny Wallace called Random Acts of Kindness lists many many such things and I’d like to share them with you here. Read the rest of this entry »

I sense a shifting in the force! Something is rotten is the state of productivity, and efficiency don’t live here…anymore.

Yep, the game is up. We no longer want (or need) to work 70 hour weeks, spend 15 years negotiating a complex corporate hierarchy and wait 40 years to experience the joys(?) of retirement. We want our lives back, and we want them back now.

There’s an old story about a corporate executive on holiday on a stunning island off Mexico who meets a fisherman. The exec says to the fisherman, “You have a good little business here, you should expand”. “Why should I do that?” says the fisherman. “So, you can earn more money and buy more boats. That, way you would be able to catch more fish.”. “Why would I want to do that?” replies the fisherman. “Well, so you could sell them and earn more money, expand your business even further, maybe even buy up some of the other fishing businesses here and earn even more money. Then, eventually you could sell it all, retire and go live on some beautiful island somewhere!”. “Hmm” says the fisherman, scratching his chin. “you mean like this one?”. “Oh…” says the exec.

Is the fisherman a slacker? Or has he got it right. What are we really working for anyway? Is it really worth the candle to defer your life to some uncertain future in which your too old to do the things you’d love to do now? Read the rest of this entry »

Time, like money, is a resource that we can either fritter away bit-by-bit on activities that give us no real return on our investment, or use wisely now in order to reap the benefits in the future. Pushing the economic metaphor further what if, like money, you could invest time so that it grew with interest and displayed compounding-like effects?

A post over at Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Work Week describes the possibilities of such a lifestyle economics. And while I think the post brings up some interesting possibilities, it appears to me to be based on the false premise that time can be compounded. It cannot. For each of us time is fixed (we just don’t know how much of it we’ve got). But what is possible is to telescope the amount of time we spend on work-related tasks to free up the (fixed) amount of time we have for other things. Such task-time telescoping allows us to engage in more important/worthy activities thereby increasing the value of that time, however we cannot say that time itself increases or grows as a consequence.

The question then becomes this: Read the rest of this entry »

What was the goal of the Apollo Moon Program? To put a man on the moon and bring him safely back, right? Wrong! Remember this was during the cold war and what the Americans really wanted to demonstrate was that they were superior to those pesky Commies. United States thinktanks examined several options and worked out that the US could probably (with a lot of effort) get a man to the moon and back within a decade, but crucially, they believed the Soviets couldn’t. President Kennedy then announced it to the world, and the rest is History. So putting a man on the moon wasn’t the goal; the goal was to be able to shout out to the world, “Hey, look how much better than the Reds we are!”, and putting a man on the moon was the means by which the Americans achieved it.

What has this got to do with being rich? Well, most of us would admit to having the goal of being wealthy, or at least being wealthier. But, like going to the moon, this is not our real goal but rather a way of achieving something else, which I would guess is to be happy, or obtain some peace of mind. Going to the moon or becoming rich are technically only the means or objectives - particular ways to satisfy goals. Read the rest of this entry »