Work-Life Innovation |

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 »

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 »

I love books and I tend to buy a lot of them. Looking back over my last four months of Amazon purchases for books, I see that I have bought 15 books. Add to this the ones I buy when shopping at the weekends and your looking at around 25 books in the last 4 months alone! That’s a lot of reading. In fact, in my garage I must have around 60-70 books stored away in bags and boxes. However, this is only a small fraction of the books I have ever owned. I have lost count of the number of books I have jettisoned over the years, usually when I’m about to move house or apartment - books are heavy!

In the past I would always just take the books down to the local Oxfam shop, but I think next time I am going to try something different! Read the rest of this entry »