Go check out a very cool printable cheat sheet for a single side of A4 paper.

While the person whose email has a heck of a lot of spam may not know how to effectively manage their email, you can be a productive geek with faster turnaround on your emails. All because you know how to use your short cuts on your keyboard than being a slow motion turtle with a mouse as a your friend!

*ouch* quite hittin’ me, yeah it’s a bad joke, yeah, I know.

Please watch the video of Dan Pink presenting in person and as a bonus RSA Animate have provided the another of Dan’s motivation speeches in a white board animation that illustrates the points as they are made. I’ve watched both to have different thoughts inspired, even thought both speaches cover the same topic of motivation.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Money is a motivating factor but once you get to a level that life can be comfortably afforded in the style you prefer then money looses its power .. at least it does for me. I haven’t yet reached my ‘comfortable salary level’ but then I do like expensive gadgets so that’s a personal journey for me to be balance.

Still, that story aside, I agree that the pressure of performance to earn a higher bonus can be a deterrent and an added stress when trying to do more intense jobs that require a lot of planning, thinking and management of people.

I’ll leave you to watch the talk by Dan Pink and make your own opinions on it but I will talk to one aspect of this: management of compliance.

One of the problems with intense cognitive work as Dan describes it is knowledge. Do you know enough to make the decisions and do the work? In most cases I would say that people do not, but how can you know what you don’t know? How can we be motivated and inspired to do something with half a tool set to do the job. Do you trust what you know? This is such a big topic on its own I think I’ll talk about this in another blog post.

Also there is the compliance aspect. Delivered tasks and documents must be done to a standard, to an accepted level of quality and reliability. We have global regulations that define exactly what should be covered i.e. don’t kill anyone with your product but quite often beyond that, its upto the company to decide their quality level. Also they define their level of reliability, this means trust (i.e. do you trust what you know?)  and risk management. To be reliable we understand that it has to perform the way its expected every time and if it doesn’t, there is a contingency plan in place. Risk defines at what level we’ll accept that the chance of the task not performing as expected is 1 in 100 iterations.

Compliance means that the jobs of how we do things are managed. Because we all have to deliver as to expectation. We have to work in an expected fashion by being at work, clothed properly, respectful to colleagues, using computers that are secured and don’t pose an above risk security level. i.e. locking down so that memory sticks or ipods can not steal away with proprietary information.

If you think about all the things that could go wrong .. we’d be frozen and do nothing. Which is what the paranoid android management has to consider and think of contingencies for and plan to circumvent. Heck, this is what a lot of IT systems are there to do .. remove human error as much as possible.

But for humans and our soft squishy human emotions and motivations. We want certain things to help us feel better, perform better, be appreciated more and enjoy our lives and not just be robots doing tasks. It’s impossible to take emotions out of business without removing people and people are business.

Dan Pink talks about Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose as well as the 20% time and ROWE (results only work environment). Trying to get a balance between all those things and more for the staff in business is a tough job for Human Resources and ourselves as managers of our own teams.

I think that intrinsic rewards offered by having a say in what we do for 5 days within a 5 month project cycle is doable. It would allow us to break out of our daily moulds and work with new people. We’d be able to master more of what we wish to master and not what our jobs require of us. Strangely what we do for our jobs doesn’t always match up to what our personal strengths are, but giving people the chance to every so often look up, collaborate on something new will keep engagement.

Finally the ability to deliver something that wasn’t expected but helps more than just ourselves and for a larger goal is massively self satisfying.

So I think, in an ideal scenario, it would be great to have ROWE days where we can choose what project to work on, who we work with, how it is delivered is up to ourselves. Yet to satisfy compliance we’d have the receipt of the project meet those compliance needs. i.e. a personal Getting Things Done tracker tool for doing checklist routine tasks and it produces dynamic pivot reports daily on the latest to do items is in Microsoft Excel 2003 that is backwards compatible.

Marketing could work with the coders to ensure that people know about this tool. Communication technologies can create the guidance site and video training for it. One day later .. whaddya know .. one solution that helps hundreds of people within the business.

Bingo: motivation scores = 1 vs. people leaving the company due to feeling like a robot scores = 0.

Just a short TED and World Science Festival 2009 conference talk where the audience sings the notes that Bobby McFerrin dances.

I learned something new today that the Pentatonic Scale is one octive range from a low to higher note. This scale is split into five sections which the human ear likes .. and it likes it a lot!

Have fun watching.

How about that then? Isn’t this something you could get behind and vouch for?

I certainly do and if I am being honest, I’ve so many other goals that this is lower on the scale for me as a personal investment but still .. I do wonder how I can help make this a reality.

I have loads of opinions and thoughts on things and .. as always I think to much and wonder about consequences of sharing the stuff I think. Maybe I should be brave and post. Maybe I will be when I find something I truly want to share about any of the things that interest me. I guess I’m interested in so much .. how do I narrow it down, but in doing so I only then present one facet of what makes me .. well .. me!

So I’m not going to quest what I write in subject matter .. I’m going to post it and in time a ‘theme’ will occur and that will be what I write. Or the theme could just be me and what I’m interested in .. it is my name up there after all

Here’s to your dreams and mine .. hope we achieve what we desire in 2010.

Good luck.

I’m always interested in learning something new, and this first video (Flu Attack!) was right up my street when it popped up as a ‘post’ within my Google Reader. I already understood most of how viruses multiply from my science classes which I enjoyed. Still it was good to see a visualisation of it to get the gist of how a virus is shared and how our bodies fight it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I also liked seeing the credit crunch explained in a video. This was from a year and a bit ago, back when it was all kicking off in everyones awareness:

Click here to view the embedded video.

What would you like to see illustrated in a video? What would make more sense to you if you saw it illustrated or in real time?

For me a good explanation of profit and loss with T account balancing and double book keeping would have saved me a lot of aggrow back in Uni!

2009 seems to be the year of video and strangely enough the year of the written word. Its a balancing act between different consumption styles, some people prefer to be more vocation and also see what is being taught, while others learn by reading. Most learn via a mixture of the two styles of presentation.

Personally .. I’m loving the way of screencasts and also illustrated videos that teach. Makes me wonder about that saying ‘Seeing is believing’, is seeing also the way to understanding?

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An Obituary printed in the London Times – not a joke and it makes you think.

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as: Knowing when to come in out of the rain; Why the early bird gets the worm; Life isn’t always fair; and Maybe it was my fault..

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don’t spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children.

It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an Aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims.

Common Sense took a beating when you couldn’t defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled some in her lap, and was promptly awarded a cash settlement.

Common Sense was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son, Reason.

He is survived by entities known as:

I Know My Rights

I Want It Now

Someone Else Is To Blame

I’m A Victim

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone.

If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing.

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The photo above from BusinessPundit.com tickled my funny bone, this is obviously an american lecture hall and its predominantly mac’s and one visible PC. In the UK its very different, the UK universities rarely support Mac laptops / desktops and Macs don’t have a large share of the computer market in the UK yet but it is growing.

I just find it humourous that we have a photo of the american students in a lecture theatre and if you came here to the UK student lecture theatres you’d firstly find less laptops visible and even then they would predominantly be PCs!!

Reminds me of when I came across Digital Cribs which is done by Cicso advocating a networked and wireless world, see the ‘coolest geek’ at Harvard!

Click here to view the embedded video.

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I was wandering the web world again because a colleague at work wrote a blog on a cool word: Tomosynthesis; which simple means a 3D image of part of a body from multiple xrays.

This started my journey and while at the site that he linked to about ‘Painless Mammography via tomosynthesis’, I came across this guy: Shaun Riley who is on youtube and twitter (two guesses who I’m now following!). While browing the page on tomosynthesis I saw the small video to the top right which looked like Microsoft Surface and I am always curious about new tech. So I opened it and noticed that it was hosted by the same guy who was labled as a ‘favourite tweep’. Eh voila, here we are!

Long story short here are two video’s that Shaun Riley has shared that look exceptionally inspiring for our near future.

The development of using microsofts surface technology and interface along with Amalga as the application to share information between doctors and their patients during a consultation.

Hope we can help impact and perform in this arena too. These video’s were provided by Shaun of healthtechnica.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Until the next post, internet.

• writing for a time capsule.
• having formalised and accepted logorrhea, instead of the worrisome type.
• guilty feelings, when forgetting it for months on end!
• personality suicide, just who is the real me?

Suffice it to say I’ve been busy … busy busy bee busy!