Stepcase Lifehack

Rethink the Season of Giving

Dustin Wax — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:00:00 +0000

Next Thursday, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and other charities across the US will be fully staffed with smiling-faced, happy volunteers eagerly doling out food and other assistance to those whose need is greatest. Families across the country will come together in the spirit of giving, and will return home beaming with pride and contentment, knowing deep in their hearts that they have made a difference. It’s the finest side of American culture, celebrating our own thankfulness by trying to give the less fortunate something to be thankful about.

Next Friday, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and other charities across the US will be understaffed, undersupplied, and underfunded, their staff working tirelessly and selflessly to provide for the basic needs of their constituents. People will go hungry, uncared for, and unsheltered. And the volunteers of Thanksgiving Day will beam with pride and contentment, knowing deep in their hearts that they have made a difference.

I love the next 6 weeks, the holiday season between now and the start of the new year. I’m a Jew, and an atheist one at that, but still: the Christmas season has a deep resonance for me. (Don’t get me started on Hannukah – it’s a second-string holiday trying desperately to be Christmas, a pleasant enough Jewish idea gussied up in Christian clothing.) Despite the consumerism and the mall crowds and the annual vaguely anti-Semitic war on “Happy Holidays”, I think the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas season really brings out the best in people.

But I think too that it leads us astray. In fact, I think it’s all too easy to get so caught up in the good feelings of the season that we lose sight of the point: giving is not about good feelings! The fact that our charity is seasonal should be a source of shame, not pride. I’m not talking about donating money here – that’s a fine thing to do, but it’s on a whole other level. I’m talking about real, person-to-person giving, about really reaching out and helping our fellow human beings, about enriching others’ lives without worrying about enriching our own.

By all means, give this holiday season. Volunteer, drop toys in the Toys for Tots bins, throw change in the Salvation Army Santa’s kettle. But keep these points in mind, too:

1. People need your help year-round.

Two years ago, I wrote a post here that suggested having your kids pick from their old toys things they want to give to the less fortunate kids who won’t have anything or Christmas. Turns out, I was wrong about that. Not about the spirit of it, but about the timing. As Sophie wrote in the comments,

As someone who works in a homeless shelter, I can tell you that agencies such as ours are FLOODED with donations in November and December. Last year enough brand new toys/games/electronics were donated for our agency to have given 20-25 gifts to EACH of our children under under 18. But homeless children do not need so many toys – for one thing, where on earth would they store them? They do URGENTLY need warm clothes, shoes, and school supplies – best supplied in the form of Walmart gift cards, to give their homeless parents the dignity of purchasing their own gifts for their own children.

Turns out, the toy drives your local organizations carry out are pretty successful. In December. When May comes around, though, shelters have little on hand to give out. Sick kids on hospitals, children in battered women’s shelters who have fled their homes in the middle of the night, and others might like a toy or two, but nobody’s donating in the middle of the year – and most non-profits can’t afford to store their December bounty year-round.

The same goes for other forms of volunteering – there are homeless, disabled, ill, poor, and otherwise hurting people who need help year-round. Maybe your season of giving could be Labor Day, Memorial Day, Arbor Day, May Day, or just Some Random Day, when your help is really needed.

2. The recipients of charity are people with feelings, value, and dignity.

When I was in college, I was the assistant manager of a thrift store in San Diego. One of my duties was to accept donations at the rear of the store. I can’t tell you how many times people pulled up, popped their trunk, and proceeded to basically clean their trunks into our donation bins. Torn clothes, oily rags, half-bottles of motor oil, torn magazines, and other refuse were common “donations”, none of which we could use or even accept – it had to go straight into the dumpster. But here’s the thing: if I objected that I could not accept their donations (seriously, a lot of that stuff is actually considered toxic waste under the law and had no business even being on the premises!) I was berated – these people, see, had given out of the goodness of their hearts these wondrous gifts, and who was I to suggest that the poor were too good for their gifts?

This is backhanded charity – it’s like stabbing someone and expecting them to thank you for the knife. Poor people don’t need the dregs of your life, whether in the form of your material cast-offs or your time, emotion, and advice. Being poor means lacking resources, not lacking humanity – if you can’t connect with the people you aim to serve, as people, then nobody is the better for your alleged charity.

3. Consider the gift of autonomy.

Notice Sophie’s advice above about giving gift cards and allowing poor people the dignity to purchase the things they need. One of the resources most lacking for impoverished people is autonomy. The greatest hardship of poverty is the way it limits you – often in ways that create greater poverty, like the way stores in poor neighborhoods often charge higher prices than stores in better-off neighborhood, because the poor often lack the transportation options to make meaningful choices about where they shop.

Think about the way you volunteer of give charity – is there a way you could increase people’s abilities to make their own choices, to follow their own paths, to develop their own abilities? If not, maybe you should think about choosing a different form of assistance.

4. Only connect.

Remember that charity is about people, not problems. You may have plenty of ideas about why people are in whatever fix they’re in, and you may feel you know what’s best for them even when they don’t. But frankly, you don’t. If you’re in a position to help, you most likely have no idea what the people you’re helping are going through. Even if you were yourself once in their position, what worked for you might not work for others – don’t forget how big a role luck and circumstances can play.

Too often, people in a position to help hold themselves apart from the people they hope to assist. And no wonder – for the once-a-year volunteer, there is little time to get to know anyone, let alone really understand what their lives are like. If you can, make a long-term commitment and open yourself up to the lives of the people your charity is aimed at. Get to know people face-to-face, as friends and colleagues and equals.

5. Forget you.

Last but most important, remember, it’s not about you. Yes, it feels good to give, and there’s no point in feeling guilty about that, but don’t do it because it makes you feel good, or because you earn points towards a merit badge or college credit, or because it’s part of your organization’s charter, or for whatever other way that charity benefits you. Do it because you must, because being a giving person is right.

The Muslims have the better of it on this one: giving is not just a mitzvah (the fulfilling of a Biblical commandment in the Jewish faith) or a Good Work, it’s one of the Five Pillars of Islam, the central defining features of Muslim identity. It’s not just something Muslims do, but something they are.

We can all learn from that. Find a way to give not just of your wealth – and don’t let the lack of wealth keep you from giving – but of your talents, skills, knowledge, and self. Make giving part of who you are, not just a thing you do.

And this year, instead of giving during the season of giving and then returning to your “normal life” when you pack away the tree and lights, let the holidays be a starting point to a life of year-round giving.

Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

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10 Best Productivity Books of 2009

Dustin Wax — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:00:00 +0000

Granted, the year’s not done yet, but publishers start to slow down new releases right about now, so it’s not likely we’ll see another contender for “best of 2009” until January. Plus, Christmas is coming up, and I wanted to give you plenty of time to read some of these books before you give copies to your friends and relatives.

But really? It’s never the wrong time to recommend a list of great books.

These are 10 books I read this year that made a powerful impression. I read a ton of non-fiction – not only do I read for my own pleasure but I’m a non-fiction reviewer for Publishers Weekly and I’m also regularly approached with titles to review for Lifehack. Of course, not everything I read has anything to do with personal productivity – I also quite enjoyed Timothy Egan’s The Big Burn and Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs this year – but given my role here you can expect that my reading tends to lean rather in a Lifehack-y direction.

Out of the stack of books I’ve finished this year, then, these are the 10 I think have “legs” – they have a lot to say and their ideas will be around for a long time to come. As always, I’m using “productivity” loosely here, measured in units of happiness achieved not units of work finished. The books in this list talk about the psychology of motivation, decision-making, and happiness, the importance of good old-fashioned handiwork, launching a business, the meaning of risk, and, of course, piracy, among other topics. While they may not offer easy-to-digest lessons in list-making and project planning, all of them are jam-packed full of information that can help you build a better business, career, and life. And that’s what this is all about.

Since I’m writing this in November, and since end-of-the-year publications often get overlooked in annual best-of lists (which are generally also written in November, even if they’re published later), I’ve decided to include books published back to November 1, 2008. So, here they are, in no particular order:

1. Making It All Work by David Allen

It would be hard to justify not including David Allen’s latest contribution to the Getting Things Done canon. Making It All Work expands and deepens the central GTD concepts, addressing concerns many have had about setting priorities, work-life balance issues, and the runway-50,000 foot views. I wrote an extensive 3-part review of this book; start with Part 1 here. A paperback version is due out on Dec 29.

2. Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford

This is the best non-fiction book I’ve read all year. Maybe the best I’ve read in this decade! Crawford is a philosophy professor and motorcycle repairman, and here he sings the praises of working with your hands, or what he calls “manual competence”. The reason so many of us are unsatisfied, he argues, is that we do deeply unsatisfying work – work that alienates us not just from the product of our labor (whatever that is – what does a derivatives broker, marketing director, or currency trader make, anyway?) but from each other (with our relationships mediated by layers of BS and managerial protocol) and ultimately ourselves. Working with our hands connects us physically to the material world we’ve taken largely for granted in these years of abundance and consumption. This book will inspire and enlighten you, regardless of your politics or faith.

3. Career Renegade by Jonathan Fields

Jonathan Fields had a dream career – and it was killing him. So he dropped everything and started over, eventually building one of the most successful yoga studios in New York City. Along the way, he learned a thing or two about chasing a dream, and shares those lessons here. Being a career renegade isn’t just about changing your job, it’s about changing your career – both in the sense of shifting from one career to another but also in the sense of transforming what you’re already doing. By turns practical and inspiring. Read my full review for more.

4. The Big Idea by Donny Deutsch

Donny Deutsch is best known as the host of the TV show, also called The Big Idea, in which he helps fledgling entrepreneurs bring their big ideas to market. This book collects the things he’s learned from interacting with hundreds of entrepreneurs over the year, as well as from his own experience building up his father’s advertising agency to a hundreds-of-millions-dollar business. This is hardnosed, practical advice, with plenty of resources both online and off- to point you in the right direction.

5. The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economy of Pirates by Peter T. Leeson

Arrrr! This is an oddball book, applying classical economic theory to pirate life and business. Yes, business – turns out pirates were quite the business people! This book offers a fun and interesting introduction to economics (and “fun” and “interesting” are two words you rarely hear in connection with the field…) and some surprisingly good ideas about how to make a contemporary business run.

6. One Year to an Organized Work Life by Regina Leeds

I interviewed Leeds back in 2008 for Lifehack Live about her then-current book, One Year to an Organized Life. This year, she returned with a follow-up, applying the same principles of self-discovery and limited, focused organizing projects to the office. Divided into 12 sections, one per month, this book walks readers though a series of easy-on-their-own steps that, taken together, create a system for workplace organization and a mindset to match it. Plus, there are rubber ducks on the cover, which are awesome. Thursday Bram wrote a review of Organized Work Life when it came out in January.

7. Dance with Chance by Spyros Makridakis, Robin Hogarth, and Anil Gaba

A book about luck – and how it’s more powerful than we think. This book will likely blow your mind with its analyses of the role luck plays in health care, investment banking, and business administration – and how rarely doctors, investment bankers, business leaders, and everyone else ever beat the odds. The practical sections are a little weak – like the authors felt they needed to write a how-to book instead of a thought-provoking one – but the book overall is well worth your time.

8. What the Dog Saw and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

I put these two together, since I didn’t want one author to hog up space on the list. What can you say about a genius who put out two books full of his trademark craziness in less than a year? Outliers explores all the factors beside raw talent that go into creating success, putting individual accomplishment in the larger social context that makes it possible. What the Dog Saw is a collection of Gladwell’s essays, focusing on all sorts of random but always interesting aspects of our culture. I haven’t finished it yet – it just came out, people! – but it’s Gladwell.

9. Start-Up Nation by Dan Senor and Saul Singer

Israel leads the world in start-ups, particularly in the tech sector, and Senor and Singer explain why in this compelling book. Among the reasons: The social networks and educational opportunities afforded by near-universal military service; lax immigration laws that create a diversity of thought and experience; and an authority-questioning worldview that keeps complacency at bay and hierarchies relatively flat. As a strictly non-Zionist Jew (that means I feel no cultural connection with Israel or with the notion of a homeland), even I was considering emigration when I finished this book!

10. Drive by Daniel H. Pink

Pink is the author of The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, a guide to career change in the form of an anime novel (which I reviewed here). In Drive, he delves into the psychology of motivation, showing that virtually everything businesses do to motivate employees (and that we do to motivate ourselves) is wrong. In the end, motivation is about doing work that fulfills us as people, and that it boils down to three things: Autonomy (the ability to work at our own pace on projects of our own choosing), Mastery (the ability to develop our skills and perform at our highest level), and Purpose (working in the service of something larger than ourselves). A perfect message as we enter the season of goodwill towards all.

Of course, I can’t read everything – I’m only superhuman, after all – so I’m sure there are good books that came out in the last year that I’ve missed. Ori and Rom Brafman’s Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, for example, sounds, well… irresistible. Let us know your picks in the comments – and what you thought of any of the books above you might have read.

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Take a Vacation from Your Email!

Dustin Wax — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:00:00 +0000

Considering how useful – revolutionary, even – email is as a communication tool, it can also be an incredible drain on productivity. If you’re anything like me, you have discussion listservs, newsletters, Google alerts, Facebook updates, blog comments, advertisements, automated backups, reminders, and all manner of other stuff pouring into your inbox all the time – all in addition to emails from actual people actually trying to communicate with you.

Of course you know to minimize these inputs, to limit updates to only the ones you most need, to evaluate every newsletter to make sure that it truly provides value (whether in information or entertainment), to subscribe only to the listservs that offer the most use, to unsubscribe from ads whenever possible, and so on. And of course you know to set up filters to divert the essential but non-urgent stuff into a “read later” folder or its equivalent.

But still it comes. And while deep in the recesses of your mind you probably know that you should only check your email at set times throughout the day, it seems like there’s always something worth checking for in between those oh-so-reasonable times – a reply to a personal email sent the night before, an important piece of information you can’t advance on some important project without, a listserv thread you’re deeply engaged in, or whatever.

And so, time slips away. You check for that one piece of important something, and it’s not there but there’s another important email that grabs your attention. And by the time you deal with that one, yet another. Then the one you’re looking for comes through, and that needs dealing with, and then an unexpectedly urgent email, and then and then and then…

And before you know it, hours have passed.

Unless you have a discipline of steel and a heart of stone, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to break free of the email cycle long enough to get some serious work done. I’m no different – I know I’ve frittered whole days away dealing with the email that came in while I waited for something crucial. And even if you are able to get a few hours away, it can be hard to get your mind off that anticipated message, especially if you’re expecting bad news or the crucial piece of information needed to break through on a significant project.

Let’s take the whole day off!

I wish I could be more like Tim Ferriss. Through a clever system of automation, deferral of routine tasks to employees, and – let’s face it – gall, Ferriss is able to limit his email checking to once a week or less. Alas, I don’t have underlings to delegate my email to – and I’m not sure I’d be comfortable doing so even if I did. And I definitely don’t have the gall to set an autoresponder telling everyone who emails me that I’ll get to their email sometime in the next 10 days! While for Ferriss his system is about teaching others to respect his time, I can’t help but feel that it’s disrespectful of the person who sent an email to assume that their communication isn’t important enough to look at right away.

But who knows? It works for Ferriss, and if I really paid attention to such things, I probably would find that nothing I ever get demands an immediate response, or even a “within-the-week” response. Lord knows my own email backup has kept me from responding for longer than that, even to emails that are probably pretty important.

Still, that’s a huge jump, and not all of us have Ferriss’ taste for taking huge jumps. Instead, let me make a more modest proposal: make one day each week an email-free day. Quite a few businesses have adopted “email-free Friday” as a policy over the last several years, to varying degrees of success.

The concept is simple enough: for one day of the week, you just don’t open your email program (or webmail). Turn off notifications on your Blackberry or Droid phone, exit your Gmail notifier – do whatever you have to do to avoid email for that one day.

The concept is simple, but the execution might be a little complicated! Here are a few additional points to make it easier:

To avoid any “anticipation anxiety”, try not to send out any emails requiring response the afternoon or evening before.
Keep a “to-email” list close at hand all day to jot reminders of emails you’ll need to send the next day.
Fridays seem like a natural day, since it’s when the flow of work (and work-related email) is tapering off, but I think a mid-week day is probably going to have a greater payoff. The natural Friday drop-off in work might eat up any gain you get from going email-free!
Set up an auto-responder for that day, including a phone number or other way to contact you in case something urgent comes up. No need to get complex: “I am currently occupied in other work and will not be able to respond to your email today. If you absolutely must speak with me, please call at (888) 555-5555.” (There are a couple of good examples on this post by Tim Ferriss.)
If you’re not sure you can manage a whole day without email, allow yourself to check email only at the very end of the day – say, after 4pm. DO NOT check in the morning – that’s how they get you! Pay attention, though, during that late check on your email furlough day – you might notice that you don’t ever get anything that couldn’t wait until the next morning of the following Monday.

Let’s all try this for a month or so and see if we aren’t more productive. If you have any tips for how to make this work, let us know in the comments!

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Stationery Pr0n: Japanese Pens and More from JetPens.com

Dustin Wax — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:00:00 +0000

Geeks tend to love pens, notebooks, and office gadgets. Some of the most popular posts here at Lifehack have been about pens and other stationery. Let us loose in a Staples or Office Max and we’re like kids in a candy shop. We can’t pass a stationery shop without feeling at least a twinge of desire – and usually without dropping some of our hard-earned money inside. And of course, there’s our love affair with the Moleskine…

Sure, it’s a pointless pursuit and probably a waste of time and money. Sure, there’s the danger of fiddling too much with the latest cool organization gadget and not actually getting work done. Yes, it’s a kind of pornography for some of us – and almost illicit pursuit of sheer pleasure.

But it is a pleasure. To write a note across finely-grained paper with a free-flowing pen that has just the right heft and width is a sheer joy. To pack your bag with tools that beg you to touch, hold, and use them is a delight. And therein lies the rub – because while an expensive pen or just the right grade of paper shouldn’t make us any more productive, often it actually does. We itch to get to work, for the simple gratification that comes of using the tool that perfectly fits us.

So when someone at JetPens.com, a seller of imported Japanese pens, stationery, and other gewgaws contacted me and asked if I’d like to try some of their products, of course I said “yes”. Japan is like the Mother Ship for stationery buffs, and JetPens.com sells a variety of unique, not-to-be-found-in-the-US items. They also specialize in ultra-fine-tipped pens and pencils, which can be difficult to find in the US.

After playing with… I mean “using”, of course – after using the stuff they sent me for the last week or so, I thought I’d share with Lifehack readers some of the things I liked and what I didn’t find much use for. I should add that JetPens.com isn’t paying me, aside from offering me the samples. Lifehack’s editorial policy is that while we do accept products for review from time to time, we only review them if we think that doing so will be of value to our readers. JetPens.com’s offerings are so unusual or hard-to-find elsewhere, that I think most Lifehack readers would love to check them out.

Let’s start with the pens!

Pilot Frixion Point 0.4mm: Pilot’s new Frixion pens are erasable, but totally unlike the crappy erasable pens of the past! Those had gloppy ink and abrasive erasers that never seemed to really get the job done. You’d expect better from the people that brought us the beloved G2 gel pens, and the Frixion doesn’t disappoint. The heat-sensitive ink is fluid and smooth, and dries quickly so it doesn’t smear. Best of all, it erases with friction – rubbing the pen’s solid rubber eraser tip over your writing generates heat (without wearing away or leaving residue) causing the writing to simply disappear. Completely. You can easily write over it, erase again, and write over that – forever, as far as I could tell. The .4mm point is great for printing; I found it a little scratchy for cursive writing. I’m a little worried about the durability of the ink – US packaging suggests that they not be used for official documents. This is the ideal pen to pair with a Moleskine-based to-do list.

Uni-ball Signo DX 0.28mm: The Signo is a gel ink pen that writes very smoothly and cleanly. The 0.28mm line is astoundingly thin, allowing for super-small writing – this is a great pen for filling out forms! I thought I wouldn’t like the tiny little cap, but it clicks onto both ends so solidly that I ended up liking it a lot (though I’m sure I’ll forget to click it to the end some time and that will be the last time I ever see it).

Zebra Clip-On Multi: I don’t normally like multi-function pens, but this one’s pretty nice – it has the usual 4 colors of ink (black, red, green, and blue) operated by color-coded levers, plus a 0.5mm mechanical pencil operated by clicking the whole clip assembly down. I say “clip assembly” because it’s more than just a clip – the clip is on a spring-loaded swivel that allows you to clip it to whole notepads, leather padfolios, and so on. The ink is fine, nothing special – this one’s all about the form factor.

Uni-ball Kuru Toga 0.3mm Pencil: The finest mechanical pencil I’ve ever used is a 0.5mm pencil, and those are a pain – the lead breaks all the time. This pencil has even finer lead, but its auto-rotation mechanism is supposed to minimize breakage by turning the lead a bit every time you life the pencil, preventing the creation of a brittle chisel-point. It seems to work, though it’s hard to know much about something that doesn’t happen. I keep the lead pretty long and it feels pretty sturdy – and I wrote a couple test paragraphs without any breakage.

Kokuyu Beetle Tip 3-Way Highlighter: One of the store’s more unusual products, the Beetle Tip highlighter is named for it’s unusual two-pronged head (which didn’t really remind me of a beetle, but whatever…). The tip integrates fine and chisel points, allowing thick highlighting over text or thin underlining. The two can be used together to make double lines, one over and one under the line of text being highlighted. Which all seems pretty neat, but I found it hard to get and hold just the right angle to use it any of its 3 modes, especially for double-lines.

You can click on the writing sample above to get a full-sized image — hopefully that gives you a pretty good idea of what each pen writers like. Now, on to the rest of the JetPens.com package:

Kadokeshi Stick Eraser: This is an odd bird, but handy – an eraser that’s all corners! The latex eraser twists up (like a Chapstick) and is shaped like a bunch of cubes stuck together, offering 28 corners. Great for fine work, and erases without ripping up your paper. I’m not crazy about the screw-off cap, though – it’s attached to the mechanism you twist to advance the eraser, and it’s all ultra-clear plastic, so you have to look pretty close to make sure you’re twisting right.

Nomadic PD-04 Roller Pencil Case: This is a standard-sized pencil case with a roll-out “scroll” that has 5 pen pockets and two small pockets for erasers, paper clips, or similarly small doodads. It’s all very neat and tidy, but I am simply not this organized about my pens – I’d just as soon keep them in my pocket! That’s not to say I don’t use pencil cases – I do – but to hold a lot more than 5 pens. Unfortunately, if you stuff the body of this full of pens, it makes getting the scroll in and out kind of awkward. I imagine there are people out there who love this sort of thing, but I really don’t see myself getting much use out of it.

Kukoyo Systemic Special Cover Refillable Notebook: This refillable notebook cover is pretty handy, and elegant enough for business use. It’s basically an A4-sized (about 6” x 8”) canvas folder – the black part in the image above forms a pocket so you can stick business cards, notes, and other papers in (there’s a pocket on the front and another on the back). There are two ribon bookmarks inside, and the elastic closure to hold it all together. JetPens.com sells refill notebooks, but what really excited me is that medium-sized Moleskine Cahier and Volant notebooks (the soft-cover pads) fit perfectly.

This is only a small sample of the stuff JetPens.com offers. Most of it is reasonably affordable, at least in the same ballpark as their Office Depot counterparts. Several of the pens above come in fancier “business-y” styles, with nicer barrels and a less disposable look, too. The whole site is worth looking through – I haven’t even touched on the various art pens and markers.

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Searching for a Shared Virtual Workspace?

Clemens Rettich — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:00:57 +0000

In my coaching practice, I am increasingly looking for ways to work with my clients on shared documents and projects online. Pretty simple right? You’d think so. I went to the first two places that I knew offered some or all of these services: Google & Microsoft. Big disappointment.

Ask Reader: What’s your dream iPhone app?

Angus Lau — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:36:36 +0000

Stepcase Lifehack readers and other lifehackers, we are reaching out to hear what types of applications you guys would like to see on your iPhone. Think of it as your dream iPhone app. In the past, Stepcase Apps were developed based solely on our team needs. However, as we continue our development of mobile apps for the iPhone, we’d like to get our readers involved and see what kind of business, productivity or utility applications you’d like to see on their iPhone.

If you’d like to share your thoughts on how you want to be more productive from your mobile, we’d like to hear to about it. Feel free to leave your comments below.

Stepcase Lifehack blog and Stepcase Apps are both operated by the Stepcase.

Angus Lau is currently consulting at Stepcase. He is a blogger and founded 852signal.com, a blog tracking startups and social media in Hong Kong. He is also a co-founding member of the Open Web Asia workgroup, a workgroup focused on Asia's internet industry.You can follow him on Twitter: @anguslau

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Review: Xobni Extends Outlook’s View, But at a Cost

Dustin Wax — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:00:00 +0000

Outlook is a well-established presence on the business desktop, providing millions with their email, calendar, contacts, and tasks. It’s such an institution, in fact, that when Microsoft radically revamped the Office suite’s interface in 2007, it left Outlook largely unchanged.

Although it’s big and sluggish, there’s no denying that Outlook does what it’s supposed to do. Not quickly or with style, but consistently and effectively nonetheless. The thing is, though, that we have moved beyond just email as our major form of business communication. In the increasingly real-time and social world, a big ol’ email client seems a little… old-fashioned.

Xobni is an attempt to bring Outlook into sync with the socially-networked world. Available in a free and paid “Plus” versions (the paid version offers advanced search capabilities and calendar functions), Xobni adds a new pane to your Outlook window packed with information about the sender of whatever email you’re currently viewing or the contact you’ve selected.

Working with Xobni

The image to the right is what Xobni looks like on my system. I’ve selected one of my own emails from the “Sent Mail” folder and obscured some of my personal information, of course.

At the top is a “business card” view with my phone numbers and email addresses, as well as my title and the company I work for. Below that is a graph of how many emails I’ve sent and received to and from this contact (which is me, which may be why the numbers are odd), but that’s just the default – the five buttons above that chart allow me to select different functions. If I click the orange button, I get actions I can perform relating to the contact – make an appointment or send an email, in this case. The other three buttons open the contact’s LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter profile. (You can pick and choose several social network functions – other options that I did not choose are buttons for Skype and Hoovers company search.)

LinkedIn gives you their location, current company and title, and number of connections, plus a link to their full profile.
Facebook gives you your contact’s “Wall” and a link to their profile.
Twitter gives you your contact’s status updates, plus buttons to view their profile and follow them – you an also post updates through Xobni, though it’s far from a replacement for a full-featured Twitter client.

Basically, the top of the Xobni window is devoted to information about your contact. The next part is about your relationship with that contact. The “Network” part is the most mysterious to me; according to their website, Xobni analyzes the “From:”, “To:”, and “CC:” fields of incoming emails to determine who among your contacts the sender also has some connection to. For instance, if I have the CEO and the CFO of a company in my address book, and I get an email from the CFO that’s CC’ed to the CEO, Xobni knows that the two are connected.

“Conversations” condenses all my previous exchanges with that contact into threaded discussions. Click on a discussion and you can read the messages in the thread, see who was involved in the conversation, and pull out any files exchanged. (You can also hover the pointer over a discussion and a pop-up will preview the first few messages in the thread.) A slider at the top allows you to move from the first line or two of each message to full messages. Click a message in the thread and the message itself opens in the Xobni bar, with buttons to reply or forward, or to open in an Outlook window.

Finally, “Files Exchanged” is what it sounds like – a list of every attachment the contact has ever sent you or that you’ve sent to them.

At the very top of the Xobni window is the search bar, allowing you to search both contacts and email messages. The results are broken into 5 categories: People (contacts with your search term in their name, company name, email address, etc.), Messages (any email with your search term in it), Files Exchanged (any attachment with your search term in the filename), Appointments (any appointment that includes your search term; this is technically a “Plus” feature – clicking an appointment returned in search in the free version will open an upgrade pitch), and Tasks (again, any task with your search term in it).

Verdict: Is Xobni useful?

Xobni helps uncover a great deal of information, most but not all of which is particularly useful. I can’t imagine what use it would be to know that a particular contact tends to email me in the afternoon more than the morning, but it’s kind of interesting to look at. The social networking features are the most useful part, I think – already I’ve discovered profiles for and added on LinkedIn and Twitter a client that I’ve just started working with.

Much of the usefulness of Xobni is hampered by the fact that, like Outlook itself, it’s fairly slow and resource-intensive. For example, it took nearly a minute hovering my mouse over a discussion with 24 messages in it for the pop-up to populate with message previews! Searching takes significantly longer than Google Desktop’s Outlook plugin – and even longer than searching the whole desktop from the Google Desktop sidebar.

Now, that could have just been my PC – it’s a few years old, with a 2.4 GHz Athlon x64, a gigabyte of memory, and Windows XP with Office 2007. Hardly a speed demon! But a search for “Xobni” on Twitter reveals that I’m hardly alone in finding Xobni too slow. Here’s a sample of messages just from the last couple of hours:

“all xobni did for me was sloooooow down outlook. didn’t keep it long.”
“installed xobni… again… we will see if my laptop can handle it this time”
“I had xobni. it’s heavy, and not really effective or accurate. had many issues with that.”
“Xobni is a Really good product but occasionally it stalls outlook for a while.”
“my biggest problem comes when I try to read the conversation between some of my contacts with xobni.”

To be fair, there are positive mentions, too, like this one from an obviously pleased user:

“I’ve been using Xobni since around Feb. 2009. Kind of hooked on it. “

(Incidentally, the Xobni team is quite active on Twitter; comments about Xobni are often replied to by @xobni within minutes!)

Xobni creates its own index of your email, so it definitely needs a lot of resources. It is possible that it’s not Xobni’s fault that it tends to be slow – perhaps Outlook, as big and ponderous as it is, just isn’t a good platform for third-party applications – but it is Xobni’s problem. While it provides some useful information and functionality, especially related to social networking, none of the information it provides is worth waiting for, especially if I can get the same information quicker just by Googling it.

People with older machines — or lower-end new machines — just aren’t going to get much out of Xobni. If you have a more powerful computer, though, Xobni might well be worthwhile. Fast searching, threaded discussions, and social networking interface all make Xobni a useful product, provided you don’t spend time waiting for it to respond.

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Information Pollution Alert! Living with Data Smog

Dustin Wax — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:00:30 +0000

We are a nation awash in data smog. This is more than just information overload — it’s not just that there’s too much information out there for one person to adequately encompass, it’s that there’s too much data out there to even make out the information clearly, let alone to evaluate and act on that information.

What’s worse is that unlike normal smog, which is the unintentional byproduct of our need to burn things to provide energy, much of the data smog is intentional. We aren’t supposed to be able to see clearly! Between pernicious advertising, ideological pronouncements, and allegedly entertaining “infotainment products”, we’re being bombarded with data explicitly intended to dull out senses and distract us from clear thinking about important matters.

This is not a conspiracy theory — it’s straight out of Marketing 101! Rational, considering actors make lousy consumers; deliberation and cautious evaluation muck up the democratic process; critical analysis makes the powerful look foolish. Marketing wants none of that! No, far better to engage the impulses, to feed the primal emotions of fear and longing, to get in and out in the blink of an eye.

Here’s a couple of examples:

Dumb Parents (Don’t) Rule!

Watch a kids TV show recently? Watch a few? You might have noticed a trend — dumb parents. Uncool, hapless, clumsy, dorky, way-out-there dumb parents. Remember the parents of yore? The Bradies, the Cleavers, even the Wah-Wah-Wahing parents of the Charlie Brown universe? They were pretty with it — voices of sanity and authority in an adult world kids struggled to grasp. Not any more — today’s TV parents are hopeless.

Why? Because that’s what media producers’ customers want. Not the kids — viewers aren’t customers, they’re product. You don’t buy Jimmy Neutron. The advertisers whose spots fill the commercial breaks during Jimmy Neutron buy you — the cartoon is just a way to get enough of you watching to make it worth the advertisers’ buck. Well, not you — your kids. You’re just a wallet with legs — what they really want is to show your kids really cool stuff that they’ll get you to buy. And of course, you’re going to say “No”. That’s where the show’s content comes in — your kids have just spent 4 hours learning that parents are uncool idiots who say “No” to all the coolest stuff.

Pay no attention to the scientist behind the curtain…

Why would an oil company like Exxon-Mobil fund global warming research? Anyone with half a brain knows that they’re only going to publish research that’s favorable to them. Why would a tobacco company fund research on second-hand smoke? Again, it only takes a 40-watt brain to realize that their results are going to be biased in their favor. Yet both petroleum companies and tobacco companies spend millions on research that nobody can possibly take seriously.

They don’t do it for love of science, obviously. Nor do they do it to convince you, or me, or anyone that smoking’s good for you and burning coal saves penguin lives. They hire scientists and churn out biased research to muddy the waters, pure and simple. Knowing that oil companies pay scientists to put out bogus climate change research calls into question the objectivity of all scientists — who’s to say that the scientists saying that burning coal is bad for the environment aren’t just as biased as the petroleum-backed scientists saying it’s not? Certainly not you — you’re no scientist! It’s perfectly logical, then, to conclude that “nobody knows for sure” and that it’s all just a political dance.

Dealing with data smog

Amid all this fear, uncertainty, and doubt-mongering, one thing’s absolutely sure: it’s going to get worse. And I don’t mean “it’s going to get worse before it gets better”; it may never get better. As more and more ways for data to reach us become prevalent (there will be more and more apps for that!), there will be more and more ways to obscure what’s important amid what’s urgent, like buying things.

So we have to learn to deal with it, to sort through the come-ons and the panic-inducing attacks and find the information that actually makes our lives better. Here’s a crash course in smog survival:

Get educated: The most important step in dealing with data smog is to build up your mental toolkit, and that means getting educated. There’s a reason that Jefferson saw education as the cornerstone of a functioning democracy.
Share your ideas with others: Community can be a great protection from malevolent data. Tell people what you’re thinking to avoid the echo effect of standing alone in a tunnel, where only you hear your ideas coming back to you. Suddenly “I’m going to buy a sports car” doesn’t seem like such a great way of dealing with your pattern baldness, does it?
Winnow news sources to one or two trusted daily sources (local and national paper, for example) and three or four less frequent analytical sources (magazines, mostly). In their quest to differentiate themselves, news outlets pour on all sorts of gloss and glitter (everything except actual analysis, it seems), but they’re really reporting the same stuff as everyone else — probably from the same wire. Get what you need and move on.
Learn marketing techniques: Learn what makes your news sources and other information sources attractive to their customers (advertisers) and take that into account. Read up on how marketers do their job, so you can identify when marketing techniques are being used on you. Try Robert Cialdini’s classic Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion for a good primer.
Follow the money: Find out who paid for research and what the payers’ goals are. Most academic books and articles list this in the acknowledgements (for books) or the footnotes (for articles); for mainstream books, you may have to check the references.
Follow the interests: Ask who a story seems to help, and how.
Consume critically: Ask yourself if the opposite conclusion is possible, and how your source deals with that possibility. Biased sources usually ignore or belittle opposing viewpoints, instead of engaging them. But it’s rarely likely that the other side is stupid or in some sort of conspiracy.
Does it matter? Maybe this should be the first thing you ask, about anything. It’s easy to get caught up in things that ultimately don’t matter. That’s OK if you’re just having fun, but not much to build a life on.

This isn’t anything like a comprehensive response to data smog — at best it’s Data Smog 101. But it’s a start — and we need a start, because the alternative is getting less and less informed about the real world around us. Maybe you have some ideas? Let’s hear ‘em in the comments.

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Put Up Your Hand If You Ever Lie

Craig Harper — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:00:45 +0000

Put up Your Hand if You Ever Lie.

If your hand went up, then we now know you’re a liar. If it didn’t go up then we know you’re an even bigger liar.

When asked the question “are you a liar?” nearly 97% of people answer “no”. When the remaining 3% (self-confessed liars) are subjected to questions calibrating their real, rather than perceived, honesty, they turn out to be, on average, 28 times more honest than the people who claimed they never lie. One of the most prolific liars in history was US president Richard Nixon, who researchers found to have lied on record 837 times on a single day.

Geeze, that’s a lot of fibbing.

Why the interest in lying?

As you know, I’m a student of human behaviour: what we do, when we do it, how we do it, and why we do it. In the field of behavioural psychology there aren’t too many things that interest me more than the subject of dishonesty. Or is it honesty? Anyway, I’m referring to the propensity we humans have to lie. All humans. In my job I listen to (and look at) a lot of people. Since 1987 I have personally completed over 40,000 one-on-one, face-to-face sessions. Close proximity. I get to see the pupils dilate and constrict. The nervous rash appearing on the neck. The facial ticks arise. The postural change. The awkward fidgeting. I notice the change in the pitch of the voice. And the increase in respiration. The lack of eye contact. The shift in emotional state. The defensive body language. The contradictions in their story. The anger. The denial. And often, the tears. Hence, my very absorbent clothing.

Listen to what they’re not saying.

How can we listen to someone who isn’t speaking? Easy. Use our other senses; they will tell us what our ears can’t. We know that communication is about seven percent verbal so it’s only logical to conclude that we will learn more about people (what they think, feel, believe, expect, fear, know, have done) by watching them, than we would by listening to them. Not to say we shouldn’t listen, of course. I’m always more fascinated with what people don’t say because by saying nothing (about a certain matter) they are saying something. People are “speaking” all the time; we just need to learn their language. Pet owners will understand this concept. Once we understand that the verbal stuff is only a minor part of communication and human interaction, our relationships and reality change and our awareness shifts dramatically. If you can’t be bothered researching (and who can?) just watch an episode or three of Lie To Me. Even though it’s ‘only’ a TV show, there’s some pretty cool science and research behind it all. In other words; the truth about liars.

How often we fib

The average person lies 114 times every day of their life. So if you live to be eighty, you’re gonna tell somewhere around 3.3 million fibs over the course of your lifetime. Wowzer!! Can you believe that?

Don’t. I made it up. See how easy that was?

The truth about lies

Of course, it’s virtually impossible to acquire accurate and broadly representative statistics regarding how many times the average person lies each day – being as we’re so predisposed to… well, lying. And anyway, who’s gonna keep count? Nobody wants to be seen as a pathological liar – or any kind of liar – so even when it comes to research, we’ll continue to lie about our lying. After all, who’s gonna be honest about their dishonesty? And there-in lies (pun intended) the challenge; in order to gain reliable data we need to rely on people’s honesty. There’s some irony for you. Take a peek at the following report from the University of Massachusetts:

AMHERST, Mass. – Most people lie in everyday conversation when they are trying to appear likable and competent, according to a study conducted by University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert S. Feldman and published in the most recent Journal of Basic and Applied Social Psychology. The study, published in the journal’s June issue, found that 60 percent of people lied at least once during a 10-minute conversation and told an average of two to three lies. “People tell a considerable number of lies in everyday conversation. It was a very surprising result. We didn’t expect lying to be such a common part of daily life,” Feldman said. The study also found that lies told by men and women differ in content, though not in quantity. Feldman said the results showed that men do not lie more than women or vice versa, but that men and women lie in different ways. “Women were more likely to lie to make the person they were talking to feel good, while men lied most often to make themselves look better,” Feldman said.

What? Men lie to impress people! I find that hard to believe. BTW, have I told you how much I’m bench pressing lately?

Some Common Fibs

Lie: Yep, I’m on my way now.
Truth: I’ll leave in ten minutes. Or twenty.

Lie: No, your arse is tiny.
Truth: You look like a f**king yak from back here.

Lie: If you don’t go to sleep, Santa won’t come next week.
Truth: He’ll come (won’t he?).

Lie: The dog ate my homework.
Truth: There ain’t no homework. Or dog.

Lie: Yep, this assignment is all my work.
Truth: I am the cut and paste king.

Lie: I was working late.
Truth: I’m a Dirtbag.

Lie: No, I’m busy tonight.
Truth: I don’t like you.

Lie: I’ll get back to you.
Truth: I’ll never contact you.

Lie: Yep, I’ve nearly finished.
Truth: I haven’t started.

Lie: I’m really careful with my food.
Truth: Careful not to let others see how much I eat.

Lie: No, I’ll be fine (sob).
Truth: Can I have some attention and sympathy?

Lying Etiquette

So now we’ve established that you’re part of the Pants-on-Fire Fraternity…

1. What are your lying rules?
2. When is it okay to lie? (an example?)
3. Is it okay to lie if we have noble intentions?
4. Should we ever lie to our kids? (an example?)
5. They say “the truth will set you free” but perhaps sometimes a strategic lie will save someone a lot of pain – what do you think?
6. What about you more spiritual and/or religious (not always the same thing) folk, what are your thoughts?
7. Is deception (not sharing certain information perhaps) the same as a lie?
8. Have someone else’s lies impacted your reality in a big way?
9. Are you aware of your lying?
10. Surely, it’s okay to lie to your girlfriend about her upcoming ’surprise’ birthday party?

I don’t expect you to answer all of the above questions (or any for that matter) but I thought they might be good conversation-starters. Off you go Pinocchio.

And in answer to your question…

Q. Do you ever lie Craig?
A. Only when I’m awake.

Other than that, never.

Craig Harper (B.Ex.Sci.) is a qualified exercise scientist, author, columnist, radio presenter, television host, motivational speaker and university lecturer. For the past 25 years he has been a leading presenter, educator, motivator and commentator in the areas of personal and professional development. You can visit Craig's blog at Motivational Speaker.FREE eBook – So… You’ve Decided to Get in Shape (Again) Craig's FREE eBook takes 20 – 30 minutes to read, and addresses the REAL getting-in-shape issues based on his 25 years of experience. To get Craig’s FREE eBook click here, weight loss books.

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11 Ways to Think Outside the Box

Dustin Wax — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:00:00 +0000

Thinking outside the box is more than just a business cliché. It means approaching problems in new, innovative ways; conceptualizing problems differently; and understanding your position in relation to any particular situation in a way you’d never thought of before. Ironically, its a cliché that means to think of clichéd situations in ways that aren’t clichéd.

We’re told to “think outside the box” all the time, but how exactly do we do that? How do we develop the ability to confront problems in ways other than the ways we normally confront problems? How do we cultivate the ability to look at things differently from the way we typically look at things?

Thinking outside the box starts well before we’re “boxed in” – that is, well before we confront a unique situation and start forcing it into a familiar “box” that we already know how to deal with. Or at least think we know how to deal with.

Here are 11 ways to beef up your out-of-the-box thinking skills. Make an effort to push your thinking up to and beyond its limit every now and again – the talents you develop may come in handy the next time you face a situation that “everybody knows” how to solve.

1. Study another industry.

I’ve learned as much about teaching from learning about marketing as I have from studying pedagogy – maybe more. Go to the library and pick up a trade magazine in an industry other than your own, or grab a few books from the library, and learn about how things are done in other industries. You might find that many of the problems people in other industries face are similar to the problems in your own, but that they’ve developed really quite different ways of dealing with them. Or you might well find new linkages between your own industry and the new one, linkages that might well be the basis of innovative partnerships in the future.

2. Learn about another religion.

Religions are the way that humans organize and understand their relationships not only with the supernatural or divine but with each other. Learning about how such relations are structured can teach you a lot about how people relate to each other and the world around them. Starting to see the reason in another religion can also help you develop mental flexibility – when you really look at all the different ways people comprehend the same mysteries, and the fact that they generally manage to survive regardless of what they believe, you start to see the limitations of whatever dogma or doxy you follow, a revelation that will transfer quite a bit into the non-religious parts of your life.

3. Take a class.

Learning a new topic will not only teach you a new set of facts and figures, it will teach you a new way of looking at and making sense of aspects of your everyday life or of the society or natural world you live in. This in turn will help expand both how you look at problems and the breadth of possible solutions you can come up with.

4. Read a novel in an unfamiliar genre.

Reading is one of the great mental stimulators in our society, but it’s easy to get into a rut. Try reading something you’d never have touched otherwise – if you read literary fiction, try a mystery or science fiction novel; if you read a lot of hard-boiled detective novels, try a romance; and so on. Pay attention not only to the story but to the particular problems the author has to deal with. For instance, how does the fantasy author bypass your normal skepticism about magic and pull you into their story? Try to connect those problems to problems you face in your own field. For example, how might your marketing team overcome your audiences normal reticence about a new “miracle” product?

5. Write a poem.

While most problem-solving leans heavily on our brain’s logical centers, poetry neatly bridges our more rational left-brain though processes and our more creative right-brain processes. Though it may feel foolish (and getting comfortable with feeling foolish might be another way to think outside the box), try writing a poem about the problem you’re working on. Your poem doesn’t necessarily have to propose a solution – the idea is to shift your thinking away from your brain’s logic centers and into a more creative part of the brain, where it can be mulled over in a non-rational way. Remember, nobody has to ever see your poem…

6. Draw a picture.

Drawing a picture is even more right-brained, and can help break your logical left-brain’s hold on a problem the same way a poem can. Also, visualizing a problem engages other modes of thinking that we don’t normally use, bringing you another creative boost.

7. Turn it upside down.

Turning something upside-down, whether physically by flipping a piece of paper around or metaphorically by re-imagining it can help you see patterns that wouldn’t otherwise be apparent. The brain has a bunch of pattern-making habits that often obscure other, more subtle patterns at work; changing the orientation of things can hide the more obvious patterns and make other patterns emerge. For example, you might ask what a problem would look like if the least important outcome were the most important, and how you’d then try to solve it.

8. Work backwards.

Just like turning a thing upside down, working backwards breaks the brain’s normal conception of causality. This is the key to backwards planning, for example, where you start with a goal and think back through the steps needed to reach it until you get to where you are right now.

9. Ask a child for advice.

I don’t buy into the notion that children are inherently ore creative before society “ruins” them, but I do know that children think and speak with a n ignorance of convention that is often helpful. Ask a child how they might tackle a problem, or if you don’t have a child around think about how you might reformulate a problem so that a child could understand it if one was available. Don’t run out and build a boat made out of cookies because a child told you to, though – the idea isn’t to do what the child says, necessarily, but to jog your own thinking into a more unconventional path.

10. Invite randomness.

If you’ve ever seen video of Jackson Pollock painting, you have seen a masterful painter consciously inviting randomness into his work. Pollock exercises a great deal of control over his brushes and paddles, in the service of capturing the stray drips and splashes of paint that make up his work. Embracing mistakes and incorporating them into your projects, developing strategies that allow for random input, working amid chaotic juxtapositions of sound and form – all of these can help to move beyond everyday patterns of thinking into the sublime.

11. Take a shower.

There’s some kind of weird psychic link between showering and creativity. Who knows why? Maybe it’s because your mind is on other things, maybe it’s because you’re naked, maybe it’s the warm water relaxing you – it’s a mystery. But a lot of people swear by it. So maybe when the status quo response to some circumstance just isn’t working, try taking a shower and see if something remarkable doesn’t occur to you!

Do you have strategies for thinking differently? Share your tips with us in the comments.

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12 Lists That Help You Get Things Done

Dustin Wax — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:00:00 +0000

At the center of just about every personal productivity system are lists – GTD has it’s context lists, Pomodoro has it’s action inventory and daily to-do lists, todoodlist has, well, the todoodlist, and so on.

But there are a lot of different kinds of lists besides your task or to-do list that can help you be more productive. Lists in general are powerful tools – open-ended, constantly growing, and effective at extending our memories past the 7 or so things we can keep on our mind at any given time.

Some of the lists that can make you more productive or otherwise make life easier include:

Task lists: Naturally, the most obvious is the task list, a simple list of things you have to do. A running list of the tasks you have to get done can make your life significantly easier, provided you use it religiously. For more information about task lists, check out my “Back to Basics” post from last year.
Project planning: Creating a list of tasks associated with a projects can be a great way to wrap your head around the project, as well as a prompt for what to do next when you finish a task. And a list of projects will help you make sure you’re keeping up with all your commitments.
Wish lists: A wishlist is a list of things you want to buy but don’t need right away. For example, I want a new electric guitar, but I’m not going to run out and buy one. When you have the money, or the time, you can take out your list and see what you want most of all.
Grocery/shopping lists: One of my most effective lists is a simple one-page list I made of all the groceries I regularly bought, arranged in the order I’d find them at my local store, with a few blank spaces every so often for one-off additions. Every week, I’d print it off, cross off anything I didn’t need, and add anything that wasn’t on the list, and go shopping.
Gift ideas: Nothing’s worse than the approach of Christmas with no idea of what to get someone close to you. Keep a list of odd, attractive, or just-right-for-you-know-who items throughout the year to help make Christmas, birthday, and anniversary shopping less stressful.
Checklists: Any recurrent multi-step tasks – like packing for a business trip, arranging a presentation, or winterizing your home – can be done more easily and with fewer errors if you write up a simple checklist of all the steps involved and equipment needed.
Reading journal: A while back I suggested that students (and other readers) keep a reading journal. Basically, this is a list of books you’ve read with notes and adequate information to recall the text later.
Links and logins: In these days of proliferating web applications, almost everyone has dozens, if not hundreds, of websites they need to log into on a regular basis. Keeping a list of all these sites and your login info can be a lifesaver! Also, if you keep a list online, you can have active links to each application, making a pretty useful start page.
Life lists: A list of your short- and long-term goals can be a great motivator, as well as a trigger list to help generate new projects. I also like to have a list of areas of focus, the different roles that I play, each of which comes with a different set of tasks and goals.
Reference: Any information you find yourself referring to often can make a useful list – metric conversions, file types, software registration keys, birthdays, the names of your children, whatever.
Logs: Broadly speaking, a log is a list of events tied to specific dates/times. Keeping a list of your exercise achievements, food consumption, words written, or other set of data appropriate for your projects will help you measure your progress as well as identify problems (like if your output drops on certain days of the week or month, or you seem to crave certain foods on certain days).
Daily summaries: A one- or two-line summary of the day’s events can help to remind you of problems that arose as well as how you dealt with them, as well as track behavioral patterns that might point to illness, conflict with certain people, or other issues.

How to Keep Track of Your Lists

All those lists seems like a lot to juggle, doesn’t it?

Actually, it’s not that hard. Whether you’re a committed web 2.0 wonk who wants all your lists to live in the cloud, a hardcore pen-and-paper person, or a techie who’s not quite ready to live on the Web just yet, there are simple solutions to keep your lists handy.

Pen-and-paper: A notebook (I like Moleskines and Moleskine knockoffs, but whatever works) can be easily modified to make all your lists accessible. I use Post-It tabs to identify different sections of my notebook, with tasks up front and book wishlists, gift lists, and others towards the back. A tab somewhere near the middle separates my project planning lists from my task list.

Desktop software: If you’re using Outlook or Lotus Notes, you have a task list manager at hand that can easily hold other kinds of lists by assigning categories to them. Other options include using a note-taking program like Evernote or OneNote, with a separate note for each list. These are easily backed up, which is nice, plus they can be sent to others. And they’re searchable, too. And if you’re a super-geek, check out Gina Trapani’s todo.txt-cli, a command-line based productivity program – just use contexts or projects as list types instead.

Web Applications: Any task-list manager that allows categories (Todoist is a great one, since it literally allows you to create multiple lists), or any project management application (each list can be a separate project; make sure your membership level allows you to create enough projects), or most GTD apps (use contexts or projects to separate your lists, or tags if yours offers them) can be a great list manager. For simplicity, I like tasktoy, but whatever is comfortable for you.

Wikis: Wikis are excellent list management tools. I’ve listed them separately because various wikis run on your desktop (like TiddlyWiki, a self-contained, easy-to-use wiki) or online (try PBWorks or WetPaint). You’ll have to learn some simple syntax for adding to your lists, but after that, wikis are not hard to use at all.

What other lists do you find useful? How do you manage your lists? Tell us al about it in the comments!

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Make Email Your Servant (Not Your Master)

Paul Sloane — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:00:47 +0000

Let’s be clear. Your email is not your work; it is simply a tool to help you do your work. But like any tool it can be ineffective or even dangerous when used wrongly. Here is how to make email your servant not your master.

1. Check your email inbox at set intervals. Do not have your email on and active in front of you all the time. For most people it is better to check email no more than three or four times a day. For example you could check email at 9 am, 12 noon and 4 pm. Then you can spend the rest of the day doing useful work.

2. Your do-do list is more important than your email. Write all the most important things you have to do each day on your to-do list and use that to prioritise your activities. Focus on getting the top priorities completed each day and your performance will soar.

3. Action emails immediately. When you read your inbox action each item immediately if at all possible. You might reply, forward, delete or file. Do not read through your inbox over and over. Read once and action straight away. If you cannot action an important email then flag it for follow up – in Outlook you right click on the message and then click – follow up today. This will give the item a red flag and you can find it easily by clicking on the flag status column.

4. Declutter your inbox. Eliminate unnecessary emails. Flag junk as junk or use an external filter system such as ClearMyMail to stop junk. Unsubscribe from any newsletters that you you do not read.

5. Maintain your contact list. Your contact list is a valuable asset that rewards attention and maintenance. In most cases when you receive an email from a new business contact then you should add them to your contacts immediately. Years later you might want to contact them and it is important to have their details. It is handy to sort your contacts into different categories – social, customer, supplier etc. Take a back-up of your contact list separately from your main computer so that you still have it even if disaster strikes.

6. Use folders sparingly. I have a few folders for really important categories of communication. Everything else is deleted or stays in my inbox. Some people have hundreds of folders and put everything into one or other. If this works for you then fine but beware of folder creep.

7. Sync your mobile and desktop worlds. Keep your messages and contacts synchronsied between your cellphone or pda and your computer. It is great to use quiet time while travelling to read and send messages provided your important replies are captured for future reference.

Some people use social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook as their primary communications tool and they are great for short casual messages. However, email remains the tool of choice for business communications. Sharpen the tool and use it well. It is an essential part of your everyday productivity.

Paul Sloane is an author and speaker on leadership, innovation and lateral thinking. His most recent book is The Innovative Leader. He helps organizations improve innovation, creativity and leadership. He is the founder of Destination Innovation. He has written 15 books of lateral thinking puzzles and hosts the lateral puzzles forum.

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Your Happiness Plan

Craig Harper — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:00:03 +0000

A Quick Survey

Before we get under way with today’s briefer-than-normal chat, I want to conduct a little research on the run. Put up your hand if happiness is one of your aims in life. And no, participation is not optional at Stepcase Lifehack today. Yep, even you scaredy cats. Okay, keep ‘em up so I can count… 1001, 1002, 1003… yep; that’s all of you. Guessed as much. So it seems that despite the fact that we’re all different people, in different situations, inhabiting different parts of the globe… we have one common goal; happiness.

Who’da thought?

But do we Need a Happiness Plan?

We create plans to build wealth. And plans to lose weight. Plans for our dream home. Future plans. Travel plans. We plan the academic path that will lead to our ideal career. Or so we think. We plan our wedding (well, some do). Our marriage. Our family (2.3 kids and a Golden Retriever). It seems we have a plan for pretty much anything that’s remotely important in our lives, so why wouldn’t we have a plan for the thing which drives us all: a desire to be happy? Perhaps we think we’ll find it in all our other plans? That is, happiness will be the net result of all the other.. stuff.

Blaah Central

If happiness is such a universal pursuit, why does it prove to be so elusive to so many? Dare I say, to the majority? Perhaps not in your (personal) world, but step back a little and take a peek beyond your fence. Take a look around. And not a cursory glance, a proper look. Examine the faces, the body language, the posture. Listen to the conversations, the words, the tone. So much of it reeks of… blaah. So much of it seems to be devoid of happiness.

Why the Long Face?

Walk around your city and look people in the eye (don’t get beaten up in the process) and what do you see most? Fear? Uncertainty? Stress? Self-doubt? Frustration? Apathy? If you had to label it, what would you say the dominant emotion is these days? Would it be closer to the positive or negative end of the emotional scale? To be honest, I’m not seeing a whole lot of joy out there lately. Why all the long faces? Why all the busy therapists? Why all the affairs? And body-modifying surgery? And substance abuse? And other addictions? And why all the accumulation of stuff we don’t need with money we don’t have?

Could it be that when it comes to the universal goal, we’re missing something crucial? Something massive perhaps? Like the whole point? Could it be we’re looking where happiness ain’t? Perhaps we’re chasing the wrong things? Perhaps we shouldn’t chase at all?

Could it be that happiness is not to be found in the chasing but rather, in the choosing?

The Accumulation Lie

Maybe happiness doesn’t live in places or things? Maybe our happiness methodology and mentality is all wrong? Could it be that we don’t really understand it? Or maybe we don’t recognise it because we’re not sure what it looks like. Perhaps we already have it and don’t know? Perhaps we unknowingly and unintentionally make happiness an impossibility? Perhaps that’s it over there, hiding behind our insecurity, fear and self-doubt? Maybe it’s in the second drawer underneath all our issues? Perhaps it’s obscured by the crap. The cerebral crap. The emotional crap. The human crap. The crap we hold on to. The crap we believe. Perhaps we don’t see it because, like the masses, we have somehow bought into the lie of the ego; the accumulation lie. The when we get enough stuff we’ll be happy paradigm. You know the one. And if we’re not happy, it’s obviously because we need more stuff. Or new stuff. Or different stuff. Or best of all: stuff nobody else has.

Bingo.

Perhaps happiness is not to be found in the chasing, the acquiring, the accumulating or even the planning; perhaps we’ll find it in the letting go. That’s where I find it.

I’s love to hear your thoughts on happiness. It’s such a universally relevant issue — it might make for some interesting group discussion. Feel free to be as deep, philosophical and/or spiritual as you like. What has your journey taught you? What do you have to teach the rest of us? Could we (the collective mindset) possibly have it wrong? Has your thinking (about happiness) changed over time? If so, how? What have you had to un-learn along the way? Can happiness be a permanent state or will it always be transient? Is happiness a matter of perspective? Is it different things for different people? Is happiness.. joy? Is it contentment? Is it the absence of fear? Or perhaps the absence of pain? What do you think?

As always, we’re not about “right or wrong” here at Stepcase Lifehack, we’re all about the respectful sharing of ideas, lessons and experiences. And yes, we’d love to hear from you Newbies and Lurkers too. We don’t bite.

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Four Kinds of Vampires that Haunt Your Life (and What to Do About Them)

Dustin Wax — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:00:11 +0000

You are surrounded by vampires.

They circle you, slowly, eyeing your throat, their teeth glistening in the moonlight. Your heart pounds in your chest as they move in, intent on draining your life’s blood for their own unholy nourishment. A scream rises up in your chest as they close in on you, their fangs bared, and then you feel the first pair of teeth sinking into your throat.

“Hey, Dustin, got a minute? I want to tell you about this awesome party I went to over the weekend. We were sooooo wasted, and…”

The horror! The HORROR!!!

The vampires in this tale aren’t the supernatural beings of myth and legend, the Transylvanian undead doomed to walk the night for all eternity, feeding on the blood of the unsuspecting people around them. No, these vampires move about freely in the daylight, and they feed not on blood but on your time, attention, and yes, your very soul. And crosses, garlic, and holy water have no effect on them.

And who are these wretched damned? They come in many forms and wear many guises. Often, you will recognize them not by their own actions, but by their effect on you: the tapping foot, the ignored gestures of impatience, the tightening of the chest as your time slips away, the forced laughter at yet another of their stupid, mean-spirited, or just plain pointless jokes.

There are many kinds of vampires that threaten you daily. Here are four you have probably encountered recently, and how to dispatch them to the realm from which they emerged.

1. The time-sucking fiend

The time-sucking fiend seeks only your time – the more of it they can consume, the stronger they get. They drop by the office with hour-long explanations that could have been summed up in a five-sentence email, they call at all hours “just to say ‘hi’” and simply won’t let you hang up, they CC you and everyone else they know on every email (especially the ones that promise a gruesome death if you don’t follow suit) – and when you actually need them, they’re nowhere to be found.

Like summoning a demon, dealing with the time-sucking fiend relies on powerful boundaries – and also like summoning a demon, you can only count on yourself to maintain those boundaries. While you might have heard business leaders extolling the virtues of an “open-door” policy, you have to realize that an open door is an invitation, and you hopefully know better than to invite a vampire in! It’s better to limit your open door to specific times and schedule the rest of your work around those times.

But the most powerful weapon in your arsenal against time-sucking fiends, your wooden stake, is to just say “No”.

“Hey Jan, got a minute?”

“Oh, sorry, I really don’t. I’m hard at work on this report/email to a vendor/chapter of my novel/game of Solitaire. If it’s important, why don’t you send me an email or we can schedule 10 minutes later this week to discuss it.”

Asserting your unavailability and then taking control of the situation is the key, here. Never leave the time-sucking fiend at a loss for what to do next; instead, offer an option or two (never more) so they feel like their issue will be addressed. But never back down – your time is yours, as long as you treat it as such.

2. The humorless hellhound

The humorless hellhound didn’t quite follow the joke you made at lunch today, and wants you to know it! Besides taking up your time, the humorless hellhound sucks the fun out of life, demanding an explanation of every off-hand comment you or anyone else makes, and complaining about being made the butt of a joke by someone else. They’d never get offended and confront the person who offended them – that’s what everyone else is for!

Be firm with the humorless hellhound – simply say “It wasn’t important” and steer the conversation back to topics of substance or, if there are none, walk away. Neither defend nor condemn others with whom the humorless hellhound has a problem; your only response should be “Take it up with them”.

Note: Often people who make offensive remarks hide behind the mask of humor (very often these people are vacuous horrors; see below), attempting to deflect attention from their own offensiveness by saying “aw, it was just a joke!” Those who stand up to jerks like that are certified Van Helsings, not humorless hellhounds. Learn to tell the difference – it could save your life!

3. The vacuous horror

The vacuous horror is an idiot, and he or she doesn’t care who knows it. Their pleasures are simple: drink to excess, bed hot chicks or dudes, get sooooo high, play their music sooooo loud, party sooooo hard. Or at least talk about those things – and talk, and talk, and talk talk talk. They don’t want your time, or not just your time, they want your attention – and somehow, your jealousy, as if you should envy their pseudo-wannabe-MTV lives.

The silver bullet here is to tell them it all sounds pretty lame, but of course, nobody uses silver bullets. Too fatal. After all, you kind of feel sorry for them, all shriveled and naked and weak – they’re like children. Stupid, nasty children, but children nonetheless. Your best bet, then, is to treat them as blood-sucking fiends, carefully limiting their access and steering them towards matters of more substance. A curt “Yeah, that sounds great. Listen, I’ve got to get going…” might be called for if they just won’t pass on to the next world, though…

4. The detail demon

While attention to detail is important, the detail demon isn’t concerned with making sure things work, he or she is concerned with a thousand minor points that have no significance or bearing on anything outside of her or his decomposing mind. The detail demon wants to discuss the pros and cons of the serial comma in the corporate stylebook, and s/he wants to discuss it now. For a really, really, really long time.

Fortunately, the detail demon is easily dispatched. Like the time-sucking fiend, under no circumstances give the detail demon any control over your time! Instead, ask them to write up an itemized list of their concerns and email it to you (or otherwise deliver it) so you can review them thoroughly. Since most of their concerns will not matter much, you can usually just give them a simple “go ahead” on the changes they suggest; anything of actual importance they bring up actually does need to be addressed, so they’ve just saved you some time! Turning the vampire’s power against them – that’s ninja-level stuff!

Who’s haunting your house?

These four aren’t the only vampires prowling the streets and hallways of our lives. For the good of your fellow Lifehack readers, what other kinds of vampires have you run into lately? And more importantly, how did you vanquish these foul, foul beasts? The future of all our productivity may depend on you!

(Happy Halloween!)

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Being a Man in the 21st Century (Part 2)

Dustin Wax — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:00:55 +0000

Earlier this week, I began a discussion of the way that manhood in American society is changing. Today, I want to revisit the topic with some of my own ideas about how these changes could lead to a more enriching and satisfying take on masculinity.

Before I do that, though, I want to say how thrilled I was at the response the first post got – I had never expected such lengthy, thoughtful comments and the depth of insight that you, Lifehack’s readers, have shared with us. I had intended to respond directly to some of the comments, but they turned out to be so rich and complex that any response I could give would hardly do them justice. If you missed that post, I implore you to go back and look at the comments.

I also want to point out that these changes are not limited to the American scene, though that’s the context I know best. Around the world, women are emerging as major players in the increasingly global economy. One sign of the role women are playing is the success of the microloan movement, many of whose programs lend primarily or solely to women.

I don’t claim that I have all the answers, by the way. In fact, despite the fact that I teach women’s studies for a living and have spent more than a decade dwelling on the issues I’m raising in these posts, I am as prone to chauvinistic thinking, objectification of women, and just plain dumb behavior as the next guy. It’s the way we’ve been socially and culturally conditioned — creating unconscious thought processes that aren’t always immediately apparent. The best I think we can hope for is self-awareness and growth, not the instant transformation of every man into a superhero overnight. It will be the next generation, the kids who grow up in a world where women are full participants in our public lives, that will show us best how to be men that embrace true equality – and I have no doubt that they’ll look on me as unkindly as I look on, say, the anti-Suffragists of the last century.

We are all feminists now.

Aside from a few hard-core traditionalists, just about everyone now accepts as a given that both men and women will have an education, a career, and a public life. Each and every one of us benefits daily from the greater participation of women in our society: we use medicines developed by women, we use products designed by women, we live by laws written by and voted on by women, and so on. By lowering the barriers that prevented women from developing to their fullest extent in the past, we have effectively doubled the pool of talent that we as a society draw on.

The idea that a woman can’t be this or that is falsified by the reality that there is virtually no job category that women haven’t entered and excelled in. Real men encourage those around them, male or female, to realize their fullest potential, regardless of their own or others’ preconceptions. That’s feminism.

There is no “men’s work” and “women’s work”, there is only work.

Sociologists estimate that there are as many as 2 million stay-at-home dads in the US right now. And fathers as a whole – stay-at-home dads or otherwise – spend almost as much time with their children as mothers do. Men do laundry, cook dinner, buy groceries, and drop the kids off at soccer practice. Meanwhile, women write legal briefs, run for office, work construction equipment, and direct corporate mergers. The idea that certain kinds of work are “feminine” or “masculine” is dead in the water. Although there are plenty of holdouts who are still inclined to fill positions based at least in part on gender, the most successful businesses work hard to focus their hiring on demonstrated talent. Likewise, the most successful families have found that splitting household tasks not according to gender but according to skill and available time. There are plenty of un-handy men around, and plenty of non-domestic women, and we all benefit when they’re encouraged to do the things they’re good at instead of the things their gender allegedly suits them for.

Parenting is fundamental.

The reason that so many men are choosing to spend all or a significant part of their lives elbow-deep in domestic parenting tasks is that we are finally learning how much we’ve been missing in our traditional 8am-8pm work+commute+overtime workaholic schedules. Whole generations of men have missed not only seeing their kids grow up, but seeing themselves grow up. Parenting is about so much more than financially supporting someone through their childhood years, it’s about tending to cuts and scrapes, putting a balanced meal on the table, and dealing with the scores of childhood traumas that mark our growth into personhood. It’s about sacrifice, hands-on responsibility, and struggling alongside our kids to make sense of the world. The stereotypical middle-aged man sporting a ponytail and a convertible is, I think, a product of the kind of selfishness that real parenting necessarily eliminates.

Passion is a priority.

Manhood in the 20^th century was about financial success – working a job you hate because it puts food on the table. With both men and women supporting their families, though, some of that pressure is lifted. Of course, we still need to work, but just as important as earning a living is the passion that drives us to excel – even at careers that are not especially lucrative. We can see, for instance, the rise of “lifestyle entrepreneurs“, people who start their own businesses not so much in hopes of getting rich but in order to support themselves doing something they love, as an indicator of the way that income is giving way to passion as a measure of one’s manhood.

Embrace difference.

It’s becoming harder and harder to take people who rant about the difference between men and women seriously. For every generalization, we can point to a thousand exceptions – men who love shopping and women who hate it, women who whoop and holler over their football team’s victory and men who couldn’t tell you if the Cleveland Browns play in the American League or the National League*.

Traditional masculinity was about punishing any man who stepped out of bounds, whether it was because he was gay, feminine, physically weak, or in some other way short of the masculine standard. That simply doesn’t fly any more – there are as many different ways of being “manly” (or “womanly”, for that matter) as there are men (or women). And success doesn’t come in spite of those differences, it comes because of it – they create the diversity that allows businesses, organizations, and other endeavors to be flexible, to adapt to changing circumstances, and to innovate. In short, difference allows us to thrive, and we need to stop fearing it and embrace it.

And that goes for other kinds of differences, too – racial, ethnic, sexual orientation, religious, national, linguistic, you name it. Being a confident man these days means not being threatened by what we don’t understand, it means seeking greater understanding.

* Yes, I know. It’s funny, see?

It’s about us.

Though “being one’s own man” has long been held up as a standard of masculinity, it’s rarely been realized in practice. The eras of manhood that we look back to nostalgically as models of “when men were men” – I’m thinking, for example, of the Mad Men era – were times of stunning conformity. We weren’t our own men, we were beholden to a particularly narrow model of what men should be, and men who didn’t fit that model were punished, often brutally.

The 21^st century offers men a real opportunity to live up to the ideal of being our own men, though. The possibilities for personal development and self-expression have never been greater. It’s no longer about what women find attractive – freed from the need to find man to support and protect them, women are finding themselves attracted to a wide range of types that in the past might have been considered “unmanly”. It’s no longer about being “one of the boys” – that kind of conformity is poison to the modern workplace and to modern communities. No, manhood today is about us, about living our own lives as fully and satisfyingly as we can.

It’s about you.

Like I said, I don’t have all the answers, and I’m intensely curious about your thoughts. I’ve left some things out, too – most notably sex, but also fashion, personality, and matters of taste or style. These things have become so various that there’s no way I could do them any justice here. By and large, I think they fall under the category of embracing difference – of recognizing that in a society where diversity is a crucial value, men will find a huge variety of ways to dress, act, enjoy their leisure time, and make love. But maybe you have thoughts on those topics as well – the conversation in part 1 was brilliant, let’s see if we can keep it up in the comments here!

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Review: aNobii for iPhone

Leon Ho — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:00:09 +0000

aNobii.com is a cataloging and social networking website for booklovers. On aNobii you can catalog your book collection on a beautiful wooden shelf and meet people with similar reading tastes. aNobii has an international following with information on over 10 million books, including 200,000 book reviews spanning 15 languages.

aNobii has just released an iphone app, and we’ve had a chance to try it out. The bottom line: this is the best iPhone app for booklovers we’ve seen so far.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the features that set aNobii apart:

Barcode Scanning

The barcode scanning feature is a major selling point. Rather than starting from scratch with their own system, aNobii has partnered with Barcode Monster, a startup that focuses on software that enables ordinary webcams to scan barcodes.

The interface is intuitive. Click on the “Scan” button and you’ll go into camera mode, with a semi-transparent hint that helps you fit the barcode into the right spot. You don’t have to press any button; the app starts scanning automatically when your hand is steady (using iPhone’s accelerometer to detect movements), and stops when it recognizes a barcode. On our first try it took about 5 seconds. We quickly got the hang of it, though, and soon were averaging scans in about a second.

One thing to note is that when it scans, it keeps making the standard shutter sound. aNobii’s explanation is that Apple does not allow real-time processing of video recording at the moment, so they have to resort to taking still pictures rapidly instead. If you are scanning a bunch of books, the shutter sound can get annoying. You can turn it off by muting your iPhone.

Another caveat is that barcode scanning is only available to 3Gs users, probably because earlier models lack auto-focus. For those with a 3G or 2G phone, there’s a lite version that has the same features except barcode scanning.

After a barcode is recognized, the cover and the title appears. Click on the cover to see the details of the book.

Search

You can search for a book by entering the title, the ISBN, or by scanning its barcode. We’ve tried a dozen English titles from our office and aNobii has information for all of them.

Book info

For each book, you can see reviews, basic details, and which online bookstores are selling it. Not every book we’ve tried had as many reviews as we would like, though. It would be more convenient if there are links to reviews from other websites as well.

Wish List

You can make a wish-list of books you want to read. This is a helpful reminder next time you visit a bookstore. This feature is simple and gets the job done.

Shelf

Using your iPhone as a barcode scanner, you can build your collection quite quickly. While the wooden shelf looks very nice, there seems to be little need to have your collection in your pocket. On the other hand, your mobile shelf will sync with your shelf on the aNobii website, which is more useful as you can share your collection with friends and fellow booklovers.

aNobii is $1.99 in the iTunes App Store.

Pros

Barcode scanning is fast and easy
Intuitive interface to build your collection or wish list
Allows you to find reviews handily – great for shopping at bookstores
Work seamlessly with the website version (http://www.anobii.com)

Cons

Barcode scanning is limited to 3Gs only (there’s a lite version for 3G and 2G)
Social network features available on website are not available on this iphone app

Leon Ho has a decade of experience in technology and the Internet. He was a manager of Software Engineering at Red Hat, Inc. and led an international team of software engineers. In 2007, Leon left Red Hat to launch Stepcase as an umbrella for both Stepcase Lifehack and Stepcase Apps. Recently, he won the #4 spot in BusinessWeek's Top 24 Young Asian Entrepreneurs.

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Being a Man in the 21st Century (Part 1)

Dustin Wax — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:00:32 +0000

Manhood is changing. It’s as simple, and as complicated, as that.

Two recent events prompted me to write about manhood today. The first was the release of The Shriver Report, a study of the status of women in the United States. The second was the publication of The Art of Manliness, a book of advice on manhood based on the popular blog of the same name.

The Shriver Report’s most stunning finding is that women now make up half of the American workforce, and are the primary breadwinner or co-breadwinner in 2/3 of American families. While I think the report goes too far in calling us “a woman’s nation” – for one thing, women still earn much less, both in terms of average annual income and lifetime income, than men – it does highlight a significant change in American culture. People my age and lower will most likely never know a workplace in which men and women don’t figure at least equally.

The Art of Manliness is one sign of this change. While I haven’t read the book yet, I’ve been following the blog since its inception, and to boil it down to its essence: men are not quite sure how to be anymore.

Masculinity has been constructed over the last century almost entirely around the idea of men as providers and protectors, and frankly, women don’t need that any more. Already in at least a dozen major metropolitan areas, women earn on average more than men. Women are waiting longer to get married, and are more often the initiators of divorce – with their own incomes, they can afford to be pickier about their spouses, both going into marriage and when deciding whether to continue their relationships.

This has all happened in the context of larger social changes that have eliminated a great many jobs that were traditionally the sole province of men – the manufacturing and heavy labor jobs that relied on a powerful physique and a kind of working class swagger, most of which have been either automated or off-shored. At the same time, a new knowledge economy has sprung up, privileging communication, creativity, and self-motivation over brawn and emotional control. While there’s no inherent reason why women should do better in these emerging businesses than men, the fact is that men have largely given over the field while wasting time twiddling our thumbs over the loss of jobs where “men could be men”.

What do I mean? Well, women now make up the majority of college and grad school students, even in many areas in science and technology traditionally considered to be men’s domains. Boys almost never read – only some 1 out of 5 young adult books are read by boys, who have determined that reading books is for sissies. Boys are more likely to drop out of high school (35% of boys vs 28% of girls in 2003).

Basically, instead of learning how to be men in a changing world, we’ve been boys, dragged kicking and screaming into a world where women are increasingly equal players. Waaahhhh!

Emphasis on “kicking” – instead of figuring out how to do this new thing, we’ve focused most of our energy on simply emphasizing the characteristics that traditionally defined masculinity, namely toughness and physical brawn. Even our toys have been affected! For instance, below are two pictures of Luke Skywalker dolls. On the left is the Luke that I had when I was a boy, right after the first movie came out. On the right is a more recent version of the same character.

As you can see, the farm boy from Tattooine has been working out quite a bit since his debut in 1977! The same bulking up can be seen in nearly all figures aimed at boys – they’ve become more muscular, conveying a greater impression of raw physical power.

This wouldn’t be especially remarkable if not for the fact that physical power is less and less needed in our society – even in the military. These toys embody ideals that are increasingly disconnected with the reality that we live in, a kind of ironic nostalgia for a time when “men were men”. (Ironic because, when we look back at those men, they were quite a bit softer and less physically imposing than we think!)

In the end, the exaggerated emphasis on toughness and physical strength are misleading – and besides creating a great deal of violence in our society, they are preventing us from thinking in constructive ways about the kind of men we could be in today’s world. And that’s too bad, because the changes we’re living in are largely positive – men are, or could be, much more connected with their families and their partners, women are getting the opportunity to develop identities that aren’t solely defined by motherhood, and the workforce is getting a much larger pool of people to draw talent from. Win-win-win!

I’ll be back later in the week with a follow-up to this post describing some of the ways I think men can more productively engage the society we live in – without sacrificing some core sense of our identities as men. But before I do that, I wanted to get a sense of what you see as masculine in the new century. Men, how is your life different from your fathers’? Women, what do you want and expect from the men in your lives? Let’s get a discussion going!

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How to Give a Great Speech: Part 2 Delivery

Paul Sloane — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:00:04 +0000

An important speech can be a worry. The keys for success are good preparation and confident delivery. If you have prepared your talk well and memorised the key points then you are ready to give a great performance. And it is a performance. Giving a talk should be much more than simply conveying information – it involves an element of drama and of theatre. Here are some tips:

1. Be confident.

You will be nervous and that is natural. The best antidote is to rehearse a clear and confident opening to your talk. The audience can read your demeanour instantly. They will be sad to see a quiet, diffident start so please them with a bright, confident opening. You could ask a question, throw down a challenge, quote a famous person, tell a joke or state an interesting fact. Your start sets the tone and a good start will lift you and the audience.

2. Look them in the eye.

Do not hide behind a lectern or read from your notes. Walk about the stage, look directly at people and talk to them from your heart. Eye contact is important. It engages the audience and raises the level of the talk.

3. Speak clearly.

Your voice is the tool that does the job so use it well. You should not rush or mumble. Use clear short sentences and speak with conviction. Make sure that you can he heard. For larger audiences always use a microphone. Vary your voice. Practise altering the volume, pitch and speed of your delivery. Variety of delivery adds interest especially if it is done in such a way as to reinforce the message.

4. Use some rhetoric.

Barack Obama is a master of using rhetorical devices such as contrast and the list of three. Simple contrasts work well e.g. ‘We come not in fear, but in hope.’ The list of three items is very powerful e.g. ‘We can do this thing, we should do this thing and we must do this thing.’ These well-established methods of delivery may sound a little contrived when you practise them but the audience will respond.

5. Pause.

The most powerful weapon in the speaker’s armoury is the pause. Use it carefully and it will rivet your listeners. For example use it before an important item, after a question or before delivering the punch line to your story.

6. Don’t worry if you forget something.

If you speak from memory and without notes then you will often forget some item that you had intended to say. Don’t worry. The audience does not know that you missed anything so don’t apologise or scramble around. If your speech is short and with a clear message then it is fine.

7. Finish strongly.

Signal that you are concluding and then give a simple summary. End with the one clear message that you want people to take away and then thank them for their attention.

Speaking in public can be daunting but exhilarating too. Enjoy it.

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What Will You Learn Today?

Craig Harper — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:00:17 +0000

A Typical Life?

I gotta be honest, I really like my life. Of course I have my moments (being human and all), but for the most part, it rocks. Not a day goes by where I am not thankful for, or totally aware of, what I have and what I’ve been given. Of course it’s not always a normal, conventional or typical life by any means (but who has that?) – and sure, I’ve disappointed my long-suffering mother by not providing her with the expected grandchildren to this point in time – but it’s a fun life nonetheless. Sorry about that, Mary. I’ll do better.

Naah, I probably won’t.

What do You Like Most About Your Life?

Anyhoozle… someone asked me recently what I like most about my life. “Good question”, I replied. I pondered for a moment and while I get to do lots of cool things, I concluded that the funnest (a word) thing about my life right now is the people I get to meet and learn from. To say I meet a broad cross-section of people would be a massive understatement. From elite athletes to fat business people. From celebrities to people battling life-threatening diseases. From the arrogant to the humble. From the powerless to the powerful. From the well-known to the unknown. From the financially rich to the spiritually rich. From prisoners to prophets. From the angry to the enlightened. And from the obsessed to the apathetic. Yep, they have all taught me something. Knowingly or not. Intentionally or not.

Interestingly, some of the most negative, self-obsessed, self-destructive and problem-focused people have taught me the most. Specifically, how not to be and what not to do.

Where we Choose to Learn

I have always been a keen observer of people and a passionate student of human behaviour; even as a young boy. Long before I understood what the term behavioural psychology meant, I was studying people, absorbing and processing information and learning lessons. Life lessons. People lessons. Communication lessons. Leadership lessons. Management lessons. Lessons about manipulation, influence, power, humility, fear, health, success, attitude, happiness… and a whole lot more. While I enjoyed school and university (to a point), I have always understood that (for me) there were many more valuable truths to be uncovered beyond the (traditional) classroom. I have always found people to be fascinating, inspiring, curious, amazing, confusing, selfish, selfless, fearful, courageous and profoundly interesting creatures.

I have learned that being a student is a choice. As is humility. As is honesty. As is personal growth.

My Philosophy on Learning

I have a somewhat “cheesy” mantra that I wheel out periodically and while I hate the over-used, self-help cliches that typify so much of what’s painful and annoying about the field of personal development, the following statement is an accurate and honest representation of my attitude towards learning:

“The world is my classroom, each day is a new lesson and every person I meet is my teacher.”

As trite as it might sound, the above ideology can be both enlightening and transformational when we truly understand and embrace the power and potential that comes from living in this kind of paradigm.

The Non-Learner

In truth, some people have not learned (listened, changed, grown, improved, adapted, paid attention, asked a question) in twenty years; just take a look at the kind of results they produce, how little of their ability they use, how much of their time they waste and how their existence is typically one of repetition, frustration and mediocrity. And complaining. Groundhog Day for the perpetually miserable and unfulfilled. For a range of reasons, they have chosen not to learn new things. It seems that some people are too proud, fearful, arrogant, busy, distracted, insecure or lazy to learn. What a pity, what a waste (of everything) and what an unnecessary reality to inhabit.

Opening Our Eyes

If we so choose, our world (the one we create and inhabit) can be different from now… or like too many others, we can keep living our life in a holding pattern. We can be problem-focused or lesson-focused; it’s a choice. It’s a mindset. Some choose to whine and bitch, others to learn. From right now we can open our eyes, shift our attitude, learn new things and produce better results, simply by looking at old things in new ways. Internal shift produces external shift. That is, transformation always works from the inside-out. If there’s a genuine desire to learn, the lessons will always be there. In fact, they are always there but we fail to pay attention. If only we would listen to what life (God, the universe, subconscious us) is saying. The wisdom is there. The truth is there. The joy is there. And the lessons are there for anyone who chooses to be a seeker and a student.

So what have you learned lately? Do tell! Feel free to teach the rest of us something by sharing any recent revelations, insights, life-lessons or moments of clarity. And as always, feel free to share your thoughts on this article.

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The Science of Motivation

Dustin Wax — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:00:00 +0000

What motivates you?

While there are thousands, millions, maybe billions of answers to that question, a growing body of research, some of it dating back 50 years, shows two things that don’t motivate us very well – the promise of rewards and the threat of punishment.

It seems counter-intuitive, since after all we take it for granted that we need incentives to do work. It’s the basis of our whole economic system, for crying out loud! And yet, the research is abundantly clear: once a reasonable standard of living is achieved, rewards and punishment not only don’t motivate us to do more, better, or faster, they often demotivate us.

One classic example of this is a study involving lawyers asked to provide legal services for low-income persons. One group was asked to do so for a low fee, $10 or $20 an hour, while the other was asked to do so for free. Interestingly, the subjects asked to provide services for a fraction of their typical rate were unwilling to do so, while those asked to do so for free were overwhelmingly willing. By offering a small fee, the subjects were actually less motivated, since they could only think of the work in relation to their normal, much larger fees. The other subjects were not pushed to think about their work as an economic transaction (in which the fee was nothing) and so were able to imagine other ways in which the work itself was its own reward.

Rewards force us to consider our work in a limited way, even work that we might gain great satisfaction from doing without the promise of reward. In fact, offering incentives can limit not only one’s perception of the work but one’s ability to even do the work. Consider the “candle problem” (watch author Dan Pink’s TED talk on the candle problem for more information). Subjects are seated at a table against a wall, given a candle, some matches, and a box of tacks, and told to work out a way to burn the candle without getting wax on the table. In one study, one group was offered money for figuring the puzzle out, while another wasn’t – and the subjects who were not offered any reward did remarkably better.

(The solution, by the way, is to empty the box of tacks and set the candle up inside of the box – most people ignore the box at first, because they see it only as a holder for the tacks and not as part of the equipment available to them. People working for a reward have a much harder time making the creative leap to seeing the box as part of the puzzle than people who are not being incentivized except by the pleasure of solving the puzzle itself.)

I should clarify here: it should be clear by now that it’s not rewards in the abstract that demotivate us, it’s rewards that are external to the task at hand. We are actually very easily motivated by any sort of challenging work, which is why so many of our hobbies involve complex problem-solving (working on motorcycles, woodworking, gourmet cooking, reading mysteries, sailing, training pets, collecting rare things, fantasy sports, and so on). But when someone else offers us money (or some other reward) to complete the same problems, it gets shunted into the category of “work” and our creativity shuts down.

The trick to motivation, then, is to find the intrinsic reward in our work and to enjoy it. Note that this doesn’t mean that nobody should ever accept money for anything – before our drive for mastery and personal challenge lies our drive to survive! But there’s a reason why so many painters are willing to suffer for their art while so few people are willing to become hobby investment bankers – one kind of work has its own intrinsic motivation while the other, except for a very rare few of us, does not.

Knowing all that, there are a few things you can do to keep yourself motivated.

1. Have a mission.

Perhaps the single most motivating factor in our lives is the sense that we’re fulfilling a greater purpose. That’s why lawyers will do for free what they won’t do for cheap – the sense that they’re contributing to something greater than themselves. A lot of people have taken a page from the corporate world and written a short, one- or at most two-sentence mission statement, against which their actions can be evaluated. If your mission is, for example, “to make the world a better place” (which is maybe too vague to be all that effective, but it’ll do for illustration purposes) then knowing that some task is helping to make the world better can be very motivating, indeed!

2. Measure improvement.

While work that engages with the rest of the world can be very intrinsically rewarding and thus very motivating, so too can work that makes us better people. Personal growth is an important motivating factor. But most of us take little time to determine just what constitutes being “better” – we set goals like “be more moral”, “spend more time with family”, or “do my job better” but those aren’t very powerful motivators because they’re not concrete. This is the idea behind S.M.A.R.T. goals, goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Set goals whose progress you can measure – according to whatever metric matters most to you! – and keep track of your progress.

3. Make learning a primary goal.

An important part of personal growth is achieving or moving towards mastery – of a body of knowledge, of a tool or system, of a particular task. Work that helps us move closer to mastery is generally rewarding in its own right.

But it’s not always clear what, if anything, we’re learning. So I’d like to borrow an idea from marketing “guru” Seth Godin. Godin advises readers of business books, to “Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it.” This can apply to just about anything: ask yourself, as you start a new project or a new job or anything else, “What three things am I going to learn from doing this?” This will put you in a mastery frame of mind so that you’re aware of the learning you’re doing as you move through your various tasks.

4. Examine your life.

Alan Webber, the founder of Fast Company, keeps two lists in his pocket on index cards. One is a list of things that get him up in the morning, the other of things that keep him awake at night. Ask yourself what gets you out of bed in the morning, and what keeps you up at night. If your answers are positive things, you’re in pretty good shape – but if they’re not, you’re begging for a motivation problem. When you get out of bed eager to tackle the challenges of the day, and lay awake at night dreaming up new challenges, new projects, and new directions to take your life in, motivation comes pretty easily!

5. Separate work from rewards.

This is a tough one, because we often battle procrastination by depriving ourselves of something positive and promising ourselves we can have it once we’ve gotten some work done. The problem is that it paints the work we’re doing as something undesirable, something we wouldn’t do unless we had that grand latte, trip to the mall, or afternoon swim as a reward. In his classic, The Now Habit, Neil Fiore suggests that procrastination comes not from the nature of the work but from our relationship with it – work we see as drudgery that we have to do in order to get something we want is ripe for procrastination. Instead, he suggests we change the very language we use to talk about our work, emphasizing that we choose to work on a task or project. Work we choose to do – like hobbies – rarely suffers from motivation problems!

With all that we’ve discovered about what motivates people, it will be interesting to see how businesses, who have until now depended on perks, stock options, and other bonuses to increase motivation, will adapt. It’s become clear that, while rewards and punishments might have increased productivity on the factory floor, it actually hinders the kind of knowledge work that makes up the vast bulk of our economy these days. Already a few companies are experimenting, quite successfully, with ways of helping employees to discover the intrinsic rewards of their own work – Google’s 20% time, which gives engineers one day a week to work on whatever project they choose and which has resulted in products as crucial to the company as Gmail, AdSense, and Google News, is one prominent example – most managers remain convinced that their employees will never do work without the promise of a reward or the threat of punishment.

Which is kind of a sad commentary on all of our lives, isn’t it?

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