Check out Dave McClure’s Geek on a Plane. Similar idea to ours, very well done. Shorter period, slightly different approach
Maintaining Productivity at Work
March 30th, 2011
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Three Easy Ways to Make Your Work More Efficient—and Help Your Body Too
My desktop doesn’t separate “leisure” and “work.” Does yours?
Published on March 30, 2011
From HERE
This was one of those work weeks where everyone I met had too much to do, too little time to do it, and way too many distractions to feel they were accomplishing goals easily, efficiently. “You keep telling us our ability to pay attention isn’t the issue?” one colleague fumed at me, “You try posting this budget with HR problems brewing in one email thread and my neighborhood list serv exploding about an an alleged break in! I can’t get a thing done today.”
My coworker had a point. I was feeling the same way, trying to finish up a major report before leaving for a seven-day work trip. But my point in Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn actually isn’t that it’s easy for us to pay attention in the modern workplace. My point is that the workplace most of us inhabit was designed for a kind of work that no longer exists. And that has most of us feeling a little overwhelmed.
In a future blog, I’ll write more about how virtually all the things we consider to be “work” or “school” or even “life” are rooted in institutions developed by the modern industrial world and designed to instill goals and methods suitable to industrial forms of productive work. People aren’t born separating “leisure” and “labor.” The “vacation” is a relatively recent human invention. We didn’t always divide up “workers” and “managers” (although there are plenty of other power distinctions in human history). We didn’t always separate the physical space of “home” from that of “workplace.” Cavemen–or even our Founding Fathers–didn’t have those particular forms of industrial division either. They’ve been around for about 120 years, and are accommodations to a new idea of industrial work that came with the steam engine, then the assembly line, then with the modern office.
The Internet scuttles all that. My desktop computer mashes up in one place, on one screen, all the worlds of leisure and labor and worker and manager and home and workplace that the industrial age so carefully divvied up into separate compartments and hierarchies of attention. My budget is due before I leave the office and Aunt Bessie is nagging that I promised to send her my banana bread recipe and she needs it by needs it, as she’s emailed me a dozen times today, by 6 pm. Who wins? Boss or Bessie? Why doesn’t the Internet to my office computer have an “off” switch.
That’s the question I put to Aza Raskin, the brilliant young interface designer who, until he left to create his own start up company this past December, was in charge of human-computer interfaces for Mozilla Foundation, the open source web development folks responsible for your Firefox browser. It’s used by 360 million people world wide, developed by a nonprofit, and took a quarter of the market share away from a giant no less formidable than Microsoft. The guy who knows how to make compelling design for Mozilla is someone who might know how to organize his own office more efficiently
It turns out Aza has lots to say and I’ve adapted it to my office and it works! Here’s how he organizes his workplace. First, he has three separate computers at work at any one time. One holds the code or other detailed work project he is doing at the moment but it’s static. It has no connection to the Internet at all. Then, sufficiently far away that he has to physically move to another chair, he has email and Google, and all the World Wide Web at his fingertips. He stresses that he has to move to get there because he knows that, ergonomically, the small changes necessary to move our bodies to a new work station can save tendons, backs, fingers, even eyesight. Equally important, when he moves to the Web-connected computer, that one is all about searching, finding, answering, responding, it’s all in motion. But he places it so that his peripheral vision always has within it the static, staring vision of his main and best computer screen, the one holding the work that has to get done. That screen is unchanging. When he returns to it, his mind is fresh and so is it, just waiting there patiently for his return, like the beloved dog at home all day and waiting to greet you.
Finally, he has a third computer down the hall. This is his fun computer, with Facebook, the video games he likes, and other diversions ready any time he wants them. He has to physically walk down the hall to play . . . a good thing for attention and the body.
Now Aza happens to be a genius so it’s pretty easy for him to do things that most of us cannot. In this case, he has made this third computer a nag. He’s programmed in a to-do list and, after five minutes, that annoying list pops up on his screen on this fun computer to remind him of the project that is waiting there patiently on that first computer screen. And he has also programmed this third computer to get cludgier and more annoying each time the To do list comes up.. He of course programmed it so he could deprogram it but it is so annoying and time consuming to do that and the whole point of this third computer is to have a fun diversion that will refresh him and help him get the job done on that stable first screen. Doing that original work is easier than a cludgy nagging slow-as-molasses Facebook.
Hilarious, no? And exactly right. Recent studies show the best thing to do when you cannot concentrate is to purposely distract yourself, then return to the original task. Aza has raised that concept to high art.
Now, Aza Raskin is this young genius. His dad was Jef Raskin, who invented the MacIntosh, so he is more adept than we are at programming to-do lists or making a machine go cludgy, but I realized that, using discarded office equipment, I can get the same effect.
(1) Use my best office computer screen for my project of the day but go to it directly, downloaded, as a Word document, without going on line first.
(2) Use my laptop as my email and Google connector. The screen is small and it’s a big outdated, so that makes it less appealing to use.
And (3) use a smart phone for the fun stuff. Tweeting and texting and using the tiny one-finger peck-keyboard method is my equivalent to Aza’s programmed cludginess. And I can easily set an alarm to go off in 10 minutes to remind me of the work quietly, beautifully, patiently waiting on my very best screen, as if I had never left it.
Three easy steps. Someday, these makeshift ways of redistributing our attention and helping us to do our work better in the digital office will be programmed into the systems that dominate our worklives. We will figure out better ways to redesign of our digital workspaces for the features of that workspace, not for the features of one that is rapidly passing away. It was about fifteen years after Taylor’s famous time-and-motion studies of labor efficiency (he measured with stopwatch and wheelbarrows) that we began the wholesale redesign of work for the industrial age. Enter the assembly line and the Model T. We’re about fifteen years into the Internet’s chaotic disruption of the orderly divisions of our working lives. We should be thinking now about how to transform work and learning for this new digital time.
If we’re all frustrated enough by the commands on our workplace attention, we’ll come up with new institutions for the digital workplace. Until then, Aza’s method works. It’s fun, it’s healthy, and it’s nice to recycle all that other technology (how many old computers do you havelying around doing nothing?) into something that helps us, rather than makes us more overwhelmed and confused. Try it! And let me know how it goes.
Women Rule the Internet
March 20th, 2011
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Great post by Aileen Lee from KPCB on Why Women Rule the Internet
Editor’s note: This guest post is written byAileen Lee, Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Aileen focuses on investing in early stage consumer internet ventures and previously worked at Gap, Odwalla, The Northface and Morgan Stanley. She was also founding CEO of KP-backed RMG Networks. Full disclosure: some of the companies mentioned below are KP-backed companies. You can read more about Aileen atKPCB.com and follow her on twitter at@aileenlee.
It feels like we’re in a Golden Age of the web, led by consumer internet services and e-commerce. Just consider these stats: Facebook—over 600 million users. Twitter—25 billion tweets last year. Tumblr—1 billion page views a week. Zynga—100 million users on Cityville in just 6 weeks. We’re witnessing a generation of consumer web companies growing at an unprecedented rate in terms of both user adoption and revenue.
But here’s a little secret that’s gone unnoticed by most. It’s women. Female users are the unsung heroines behind the most engaging, fastest growing, and most valuable consumer internet and e-commerce companies. Especially when it comes to social and shopping, women rule the Internet.
Consider some more data. Comscore, Nielsen, MediaMetrix and Quantcast studies all show women are the driving force of the most important net trend of the decade, the social web.Comscore says women are the majority of users of social networking sites and spend 30% more time on these sites than men; mobile social network usage is 55% female according toNielsen.
In e-commerce, female purchasing power is also pretty clear. Sites like Zappos (>$1 billion in revenue last year), Groupon ($760m last year), Gilt Groupe ($500m projected revenue this year), Etsy (over $300m in GMV last year), and Diapers ($300m estimated revenue last year) are all driven by a majority of female customers. According to Gilt Groupe, women are 70% of the customer base and they drive 74% of revenue. And 77% of Groupon’s customers are female according to their site.
Women even shop more on Chegg, which offers textbook rentals on college campuses across the country. Males and females attend college at an almost even rate. Renting would seem an equal opportunity money saver, plus it’s better for the planet. But according to Chegg, females are 65% of renters. Why? Renting requires a little more advanced planning. Chegg’s research shows women are more inclined to plan ahead than men. And, they seem to care more about saving money, and are more likely to be influenced by a friend’s recommendation.
It’s no accident Amazon.com launched a program called “Amazon Mom” last year, or that they bought both Zappos and Quidsi (parent company of Diapers.com, Beauty.com and Soap.com) for almost $1.8 billion in total. According to the US Census Bureau, women oversee over 80% of consumer spending, or about $5 trillion dollars annually. Women control the purse strings when it comes to disposable income. That’s long been the case.
But what’s different now is that there is an exciting new crop of e-commerce companies building real revenue and real community, really fast, by purposefully harnessing the power of female consumers. One Kings Lane, Plum District, Stella & Dot, Rent the Runway,Modcloth, BirchBox, Shoedazzle, Zazzle, Callaway Digital Arts, and Shopkick are just a few examples of companies leveraging “girl power.” The majority of these companies were also founded by women, which is also an exciting trend.
And take a look at four of the new “horsemen” of the consumer web—Facebook, Zynga,Groupon and Twitter. This may surprise you, the majority of all four properties’ users are female. Make that “horsewomen”.
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, has talked about how women are not only the majority of its users, but drive 62% of activity in terms of messages, updates and comments, and 71% of the daily fan activity. Women have 8% more Facebook friends on average than men, and spend more time on the site. According to an early Facebook team member, women played a key role in the early days by adopting three core activities—posting to walls, adding photos and joining groups—at a much higher rate than males. If females had not adopted in the early days, I wonder if Facebook would be what it is today. (Why do you think all the guys showed up?)
How about gaming, seemingly a bastion of men in their man caves? The titan of social gaming,Zynga, says 60% of players are female. And a survey by PopCap shows females are the majority of social and casual game players. In fact, they note the average social gamer is likely a 43-year-old woman.
And more women use Twitter, which has a reputation for being a techie insider’s (i.e., male) product. Women follow more people, tweet more, and have more followers on average than men, according to bloggers Dan Zarella and Darmesh Shaw’s analyses.
Brian Solis’s analysis shows females are the majority of visitors on the following sites, which he calls “matriarchys”: Twitter, Facebook, Deli.ci.ous, Docstoc, Flickr, Myspace, Ning, Upcoming.org, uStream, Classmates.com, Bebo and Yelp. The one “patriarchy” site he notes, where males > females: Digg.
Yes, women also rock sites like Opentable and Yelp. According to Yelp, while half of their traffic is male, the majority of contributors and ecommerce purchasers are female. And according to OpenTable, the majority of bookings are overwhelmingly made by females. Why? Likely because women drive most decisions about where to go and where to eat.
Perhaps none of this is surprising. Women are thought to be more social, more interested in relationships and connections, better at multi-tasking. There is also anthropological research to back this up. Dave Morin of Path introduced me to Dunbar’s Number, proposed by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar. The number is the theoretical limit of how many people with whom one can maintain stable relationships (thought to be 150). But Dunbar’s most recent research shows there are different numbers for women than men—that women are able to maintain quantitatively more relationships within every ring of closeness than men. Knowing that is an important factor if you want to build and stoke social network effects. More female users will likely help your company grow faster.
So, if you’re at a consumer web company, how can this insight help you. Would you like to lower your cost of customer acquisition? Or grow revenue faster? Take a look at your product, your marketing, your customer base. Maybe you would benefit from having a larger base of female customers. If so, what would you change to make your product/service more attractive to female customers? Do you do enough product and user interface testing with female users? Have you figured out how to truly unleash the shopping and social power of women?
You could also take a look at your team. Do you have women in key positions? If you’re planning on targeting female customers, I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to have great women on your team.
If you are already targeting female customers, have great women working in your company, and are seeing strong commerce and social network effects, congratulations. You are likely trying to figure out how to handle hypergrowth right now. Plus your office probably smells pretty good.
Women are the routers and amplifiers of the social web. And they are the rocket fuel of ecommerce. The ongoing debate about women in tech has been missing a key insight. If you figure out how to harness the power of female customers, you can rock the world.
Bamboo Capitalism
March 20th, 2011
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Clearly, we need to go to China, and not just for internet companies. Great piece by the Economist. Link below
Village Ventures Map
March 13th, 2011
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We want a map like this but of the globe: http://www.villageventures.com/?page_id=109
Test of something long
March 13th, 2011
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Even before Mr. Edano’s statement on Sunday, it was clear from the radioactive materials turning up in trace amounts outside the reactors that fuel damage had occurred. The existence or extent of melting might not be clear until workers can open the reactors and examine the fuel, which could be months from now.
The Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said that as many as 160 people may have been exposed to radiation around the plant, and Japanese news media said that three workers at the facility were suffering from full-on radiation sickness.
Even before the explosion on Saturday, officials said they had detected radioactive cesium, which is created when uranium fuel is split, an indication that some of the nuclear fuel in the reactor was already damaged.
How much damage the fuel suffered remained uncertain, though safety officials insisted repeatedly through the day that radiation leaks outside the plant remained small and did not pose a major health risk.
However, they also told the International Atomic Energy Agency that they were making preparations to distribute iodine, which helps protect the thyroid gland from radiation exposure, to people living near Daiichi and Daini.
Worries about the safety of the two plants worsened on Saturday because executives of the company that runs them, Tokyo Electric Power, and government officials gave confusing accounts of the location and causes of the dramatic midday explosion and the damage it caused.
Test Number Three
March 12th, 2011
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WST – Just getting started
March 12th, 2011
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