• hand made gifts
• shop at departments stores and malls
• buy direct from on-line stores
• Amazon
• eBay
• Woot

I won’t have too many hand crafted gifts this season but I will be making a few. Currently there is only one gift I plan to suffer the "bustling crowds" for. As much as possible I will shop on-line and watching for the best bargains.

You work for a company that sells “red marbles”. Unfortunately, the only supplier of marbles ships mixed boxes of red and white marbles. So, your company created a special paddle to catch marbles from the mixed boxes. the paddle has twenty holes in it, each one just a bit smaller than a marble. This allows a marble to settle in the hole. the paddle can not distinguish a red marble from a white marble so your company created an incentive plan for workers.

We only sell red marbles. We don’t want any white marbles. You are to use these paddles to fetch marbles out of the mixed boxes. The fewer white marbles you have on your paddle, the better. The person with the fewest total count of white marbles over the course of each shift will get a bonus.

You and the rest of your shift proceed to plunge the paddle into the boxes and lift out the marbles, one sitting in each of the holes. The “quality control staff” count the number of white marbles and keep tally for each worker. You feel pretty good when, of the 20 holes, you have only 5 white marbles. Some times you have 10 or more but for most of the shift, you keep a pretty low count. At the end of your shift, you have filled and sealed 12 boxes with red marbles. You notice that you have the most boxes ready to go off to shipping. You are guaranteed the bonus only to discover, a worker who didn’t fill a single box for shipping, gets the bonus. The next day you and your colleagues all watch yesterday’s winner to see what they did differently. You watch with amazement as the person plunges the paddle into the mixed box and then carefully tips it sideways as they pull it out, dumping all the marbles back into the box. The quality control staff mark down “zero” for the number of white marbles on the paddle.

Obviously, wanting “red marbles” but scoring “white marbles” is a bad idea. If you reward for behavior other than what you want, you are likely to get what you reward and not what you expect; but this is exactly what many companies do !

This is so obvious that it appears to be completely beyond the comprehension of many employers.

I read a recent example on the internet. The company wanted to improve customer satisfaction with new sales. They realized that often the customer needed help after the sale. The support team was forever going in and helping customers use their newest purchases. The support costs were high and customer satisfaction with the sale was low.

The company created a bunch of new sales tools to help sell products in predefined bundles. So, the sales people went out and sold the bundles. It was great because the sales people were making bigger sales with the bundles than before with the individual products. Customer satisfaction did not improve and the support team still had to go in and help the customers with their new sales.

The incentive to the sales people was still to sell as much as possible. There was no incentive (or penalty) for all the needed support or the customer satisfaction rating.

OpEd: To be honest, it’s hard to incent “sales people” to do anything other than sell because “sales people” in general are motivated by money and sales make the quarterly reports look good which makes analysts happy and makes stockholders happy. So, if the company is all about selling, then that is what they incent and that is what they get. The “savings” side of the equation is much tougher. It’s easy to tighten the belt but eventually all the “easy” blood has run out of the turnip. Eventually, there is no more “efficiency” to be gained. This is where attributes like customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and repeat business improve the bottom line. Just don’t try to get that from “sales people”. … (Note: “sales people” is in quotes for a reason!)

The notion of multi-tasking is an interesting one to me.

It’s my experience, both personal and working with lots of people over the years, multi-tasking is largely a myth used as an attractive plaster skim-coat over the reality of today’s work pace - which can charitably described as too many “opportunities” for the amount of time available. I don’t think that humans are truly adapting to this manner of conducting our affairs. Instead, it’s a coping mechanism being portrayed as adaptation.

As you say, humans, like computers pay the price for multi-tasking (or time-slicing) in the form of the context switch. According to Gerald Weinberg, adding a single concurrent task yields a loss of 20% of your time due to context switching. A third concurrent task consumes 50% of time in context switching. These numbers from from a post over at www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000691.html. That post at Coding Horror also mentions a BBC study that estimated that people lose 10 points of IQ when their work is interrupted by incoming emails and phone calls - more than by smoking marijuana. This same post contains a another very interesting link on multi-tasking by Kathy Sierra.

By the way, we don’t have to go back to the 50’s to remember a time when focussed, uninterrupted time was a valued facet of the work environment. Tom DeMarco in his book “Peopleware” wrote about the importance for engineers to have a certain amount of space to work in accompanied by the privacy sentinels of an office with a door and a phone you could turn off. I remember the 80’s in the Software industry when there was not the competing attention sinks like Instant Messaging and cell phone calls and cell phone text messaging to name just three.

Regarding your last question: I work in a heavily time-sliced culture and am in a role where my day is largely interrupt driven. Personally I cope by doing what I suspect many of my colleagues do which is try to keep the competing balls of IM’s, phone conferences, emails, phone calls, and personal deliverables all in the air at once - without letting them completely overrun my entire waking life. I don’t believe that we can turn the clock back to a slower time. I also don’t think that the way we conduct our business lives right now is the only way. I do think we’re on a trajectory that will need to be completed before other ideas are entertained.

Source: Roy at Return to the Center

If you want to challenge your brain but have a short attention span <grin> you can jump to my proposition below or just read thru.

First, a digression: There is no such thing as "multitasking". Computers can’t do it. People can’t do it. What we can do, and do increasingly well (or poorly) is rapid time slicing. I won’t get into the breathing, digesting, walking, while talking on the cell phone form of multitasking because that really is offloading simple tasks to ‘lesser’ separate processors and not multi-tasking.

Most professionals have more work than they can accomplish and by time-slicing, try to fill even the tiniest sliver of idle time with work. Take for examples, waiting on hold, walking to a meeting, getting lunch, waiting for a text message reply, loading a web page or downloading a file, sitting at a traffic light, etc. All of these are small fragments of time and we end up using all of them to get "other stuff" done.

I believe that "poor attention span" has unique aspects in the geek population because computers have always been one of the things that keep them stimulated. I believe this relative perception of poor attention span is actually caused by two factors. The first is genetic. The brains of some people are just programmed to multi-task … the second factor is a simple training issue. The typical geek trains their brain to be heavily focused while multitasking day after day. Source: Tech-Recipes

The "training" aspect is not a generational phenomenon and not specific to a career path. Starting in the 1980’s TV started changing its marketing format to be more intense with more images crammed into 30 and 60 second ads. video games ratcheted up the rate further. Then personal computers, chat rooms, text messaging, SMS, multi-player games, and more really concentrated the "training" regime for the youth of the day. Well, it’s 15 years latter and those teenagers are now in the workforce.

Personally, I think it is a good thing. But, even if you disagree, please accept that it is reality. So, we can either adapt or we can burry our heads in the sand and think we can make like like it was in the 1950s.

What does "adapt" mean ? well, first, if conventional meetings and conference calls do not work with the time-slicer generation, then why not do away with them ? There must be a better collaboration experience that get’s the same end result but works in a time-sliced workforce.

Embrace Time Slicing

What would happen if your calendar allowed you schedule up to 4 things for the same period - only one of which required speaking. Next, we change the etiquette for asking questions when speaking. Rather than Sam saying, "hey, Joe - do you agree?" We assume everyone is multitasking and ask the question, "hey Joe, Bill says we need to have the contract ready on Monday for review rather than Wednesday to insure one last read-thru. do you agree?" Obviously, the second question takes a few more seconds to say but it allows Joe to be doing other things while Sam and Bill hash out the schedule for the contract.

As a matter of fact, let’s assume Joe has 4 time-sliced meetings going on. He is on the call with Sam and Bill. He is watching a slide presentation, in a project status chat room, and is in a text messaging session with a mentor. Now assume all of the people in those 4 events are also time-slicing.

This may sound confusing but I would bet the vast majority of business people today do something very similar to what I just described. The problem is not that we do this, but that we have not adapted our culture and business practices to embrace it. It is a strange case of "expected behavior" but not "accepted behavior". Business today forces us to work this way but does not support this style of work. It’s all rather two-faced to be honest.

So, do you work in a time-sliced culture and if so, could you / would you try to change the behavior and etiquette to embrace time-slicing or stick with the work model of the 1950’s juxtaposed to the reality of the "time slicer generation" ?

To demonstrate what I mean about the blog content, read this abbreviated post:

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Source: Loan Consultancy

Any idea what this site represents ? Are there others out there like it ? With all skepticism, I have to ask, “is it some new scam?”

The idea is not new and I don’t take credit for it. One example to demonstrated the value was a simple “setup your home wireless security” video. It was not more than 3 minutes long. Another example was “building a Google Maps application”. Again, the instruction was under 10 minutes.

The idea never took off at my company. But, it does seem to have a live on the internet. LessonBites has come up with an interesting business model for the idea …

LessonBites provides a marketplace for instructors to sell their lessons using internet-based video. LessonBites provides lessons in bite sizes (like individual tracks of a CD) so you can learn what you want. The price of each video is 99 cents.

The product model is the same as “just in time education”. What is interesting is the business model. At 99c a lesson, the price might be right for personal training.

I’m not keen on their solution to piracy but I’m sure they felt they needed to do something.The quality of  some videos is not what I would expect and there appears to be some bandwidth issues. The value wil only come from volume of lessons.

Of course, YouTube and other sites may have made this business model moot. Of course, “content” is still the big issue. There is more “how to” videos for bad things then generally useful things <uh oh>. If you are looking for “how to” videos, here is a “top 10 list” of places to start.

There are two options - “hosted services” and “dual systems”. If you trust internet services providers - to be safe, keep your records private, safeguard your identity, not lose your data, and be available 24×7 - then using on-line services for your photos, blog editor, email, banking/financials, etc, is a great solution. You don’t even need your own computer for most things - you could use the one in the hotel lobby (sans prying eyes) or a that of a traveling buddy. You only need to remember to flush the browser cache, don’t save any website cookies, and delte any files that might get downloaded.

On the other hand, if you might still a bit of a privacy junkie and still mistrust Internet services providers to always do the right thing for you above and beyond what might be good for them, then you want to keep your data local, do your own backups, and only use the Internet for “send/receive”. (I won’t get into whether� this is more safe or not.)

My current solution is to make my work “computer” a “dual system”. What I mean is my X60 computer can take the disk drive from the T60p and run. This means, I can travel with the X60 plus the small HDD from the T60p and have both “computers” at my disposal - albeit one at a time.

I first configured the T60p for all of my work needs. Next, I popped out the existing HDD from my X60 and popped in the HDD from the T60p. I then started up the X60. It took a few downloads to get all of the correct drivers but after about 15 minutes, I had it running as if this were the correct hardware.

Now, I can run my work “computer” on the T60p or the X60 hardware seamlessly.

Can you do *that* with a Mac ? If not, could you boot from an external USB HDD ? If so, could someone tell me which one(s) work ?

Biodiesel is a non-toxic, biodegradable fuel made from vegetable or animal oils, producing 43 percent less carbon monoxide and 56 percent fewer hydrocarbons than petroleum diesel fuel.

The machinery used in the process should be built in about six months, meaning the operation could begin before the end of the year.

… The Exmore plant will employ about 18 people and will produce three and a half million gallons of fuel the first year and up to 30 million gallons a year after five years in a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week operation.

I was hoping something like this would happen on the Eastern Shore. Now I hope they get local high schools into the game - both through science and automotive trade education.