Work-Life Innovation |

Answer: Have a lot of ideas.

end of post.

Only kidding. It is true though that most of the people who have had great ideas have had hundreds if not thousands of terrible ones. As Thomas J. Watson of IBM once said: “Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.”

The common approach to getting good ideas is to brainstorm. To get together with others and throw ideas out there while holding back on the inner critic. It’s often advertised as an almost magical, zen like leap into creativity, where all our problems can be solved. Trouble is it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because people can’t keep there mouth shut. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever thought you’d like to be doing something different? Ever dreamed about that high paid job with all the prestige, with the nice car and the big house? Ever contemplated going on a river boat ride down the Zambezi, or a hike through the Andean mountains? Ever wondered what it would feel like to swim with dolphins off the Florida Keys? Ever [insert personal dream here]? Are you doing anything about it? No? Then I suggest that what you’re doing instead is what you really want to do.

There’s a phrase that goes: you are what you do every day. What I am suggesting here is what you want to do is what you do every day. Sounds crazy I know but hear me out. Let’s be honest, for the most part we have all chosen to be where we are in our work and lives. Nobody held a gun to our heads, and even if they had, we could still have chosen the bullet! But no, we are where we are because of the choices we have made. If we are unhappy with our position in life no one is to blame but ourselves. What we do every day we have in a very real sense chosen to do. Even if that choice was the lesser of two evils, we have still freely chosen it. Luckily though, we are free to choose again.

You stack shelves for living or you clean the sewers or you’re doing a PhD or you work for a large corporation. You chose that, but you are free to choose something else at any time. If you do decide to change your situation then all you need is time and planning to make it happen. If you don’t do the planning, then ultimately you don’t really want it. And this brings us to the crucial point: what most of us don’t accept is that planning is part of the experience of what we want. 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »