Work-Life Innovation |

It’s my last night of my week long stay in the US. I’ve spent most of it in Detroit visiting friends and the last 2 days I’ve been in a hotel in Chicago where I met up with an old University buddy. I stay in hotels just infrequently enough to still enjoy the experience. I like the mini bars and the maid service

One thing new at the hotel I’m staying at tonight: Pillow menus! These are basically a selection of pillows that you can choose for free. One has built in speakers and plays soothing music, one is impregnated with aromatherapy oils, one is made of silk and so on. Read the rest of this entry »

My PhD was one of the hardest but most rewarding things I have ever undertaken. There were many moments where I thought I’d never finish. It took a tremendous amount of support from those around me and some long hard looks at how I approached the way I worked. Looking back, there were definitely things I could have done to make my life easier. The following list is inspired by the things I did wrong, as well as a few I did right. For all those of you still going through the process, hang in there! You can finish and you can definitely do it in much better style than I did. If you manage to do just half of what’s on the list below you’re already well ahead of the game.

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The secret to getting up early? There is no secret really, its simply ensuring that you get enough quality sleep. However that in itself can be challenging. Many of us are too overworked, stressed, wired up, worried or distracted to develop healthy sleeping practices. So in celebration of the wonders of a good night’s sleep, here a few suggestions to help get you up the stairway to heaven to bedfordshire, and ensure you wake up the other side feeling refreshed and energized with a mind that’s kick ass clear! 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 »

In some cases less really is more. As you all no doubt are very much aware, there is a glut of data out there and the question is no longer how do I get the right information, but rather when do I stop looking at the data so that I can act? In my days as a grad student I remember spending months reading around my subject looking for an angle that would give me my thesis topic. The trouble was there was just too much to cover, and every article led to five more. I felt I never had enough information to make a decision about where to put my stake in the ground and formulate my thesis topic. This went on through most of the first year until my supervisor took me aside and told me to stop reading and start thinking! It was the right advice. Read the rest of this entry »

A tale of one man’s heroic attempts to open a spreadsheet

“Joe is heading into work on a grey and rainy Monday morning. He’s had a great weekend; but now it’s Monday, and there’s a mountain of stuff to get through at work. Joe thinks about the tasks he has today and by the time he reaches the office he’s ready to hit the ground running. Joe’s to-do list is longer than Gisele’s over-insured legs, so he really has to get moving and start ticking off the tasks one-by-one. Joe logs in on his office workstation and is ready to go… But wait! Someone has just IM’d him. That little orange rectangle at the bottom of Joe’s screen is flashing furiously, demanding Joe’s attention. So he clicks on it…It’s Bill, with a question about some work they did last week. Joe answers Bill and waits a few seconds to see if Bill is going to reply….It appears not, so Joe closes the chat screen and goes to open Excel. But wait! The little orange rectangle is back again. Joe’s peripheral vision has been hijacked and all he can do is click it open again. Read the rest of this entry »