Recent Blog Posts
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The Road to The Four Hour Workweek : Elimination (Pareto in Practise)
Several months ago, I applied “Pareto’s Principle”, from the principles of elimination, to both my personal and business life.
It’s worth mentioning that even before I subjected my life to the unswerving scrutiny of Pareto’s Principle, friends commented that my lack of possession made my house look like I hadn’t moved in yet. As such, I didn’t expect much in the way of dramatic results.
I was very wrong.
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The Road to The Four Hour Workweek : Elimination (The Theory)
Elimination is the first step to increasing your free time, without reducing your income. In Ferriss’ words, you need to “forget all about” time management, and focus on effectiveness over efficiency.
What this means in practise is eliminating anything that doesn’t move you closer towards your predefined goals.
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The Road to The Four Hour Workweek
There’s a strong likelihood that you’ve already heard of “The 4-Hour Workweek”, a book by first-time author Timothy Ferriss. If you haven’t, brace yourself. It’ll be arriving in British bookshops soon, and it’s almost certain to have the same impact that it has Stateside.
For the uninitiated, Ferriss introduces his readers to the world of the “New Rich”; people who live globe-trotting, envy-enducing lifestyles, despite the fact that they are not members of the billionaire elite.
This is an introduction to a series of posts that I’ll be writing over the coming weeks and months, detailing my experiences implementing two of Ferriss’ four key steps; Elimination and Automation.
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In Praise of The Email Standards Project
A few days ago, the Email Standards Project was officially launched. Put simply, Email Standards have the potential to completely change the quality – and economic viability – of HTML email, much as Web Standards did for web sites.
If you’re a business owner, and think that this only applies to us nerdy web designer types, think again. HTML emails can provide a better return on investment than any other form of direct marketing, but without decent support for Email Standards the cost of developing them escalates dramatically, as does the likelihood that a decent proportion of your customers won’t even be able to read your carefully crafted missive.
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The Agile Developer’s Guide to Building a Cathedral
I just finished reading “The Pillars of the Earth”, by Ken Follett, an enormous book that details the decades-long process of building a cathedral in the 15th Century.
It’s hard to imagine anything further removed from the rapid turnaround of Web 2.0 applications. And yet it turns out that even those medieval craftsmen recognised the advantages of Getting Real.
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Working For The Greater Good
As consumers, we’re generally pretty bad at understanding what we need, and articulating those needs to suppliers and manufacturers. It therefore falls to the designers, developers, manufacturers, and so forth, to decide what’s best for us. It sounds arrogant, but the alternative is products that everybody wants, and everybody hates.
There is a line though; a line beyond which you’re doing things for your own benefit, and attempting to pass them off as being “good for our customers.” That really is arrogant.
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The Corruption of Convention
Conventions are what makes design possible. We have a collective sub-conscious that a designer can utilise when producing a new design. Helvetica means one thing, Mrs. Eaves something else entirely.
Without this societal shorthand we’d be incapable of rapidly assessing our environment, and quickly filtering out that which does not meet our personal requirements or worldview.
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Reasons Why The Grand Scheme Is A Bad Thing
When it comes to money, particularly my own, I’m naturally cautious. It follows that I’m also a lot more comfortable planning business ideas than I am executing them.
Of course, this is a terrible way to run a business. Execution, even bad execution, is immensely more valuable than the most detailed of plans, or brilliant of ideas.
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The Internet vs Creativity
The internet kills creativity. We’ve all got pressing deadlines and limited resources, and the internet is just sitting there, promising a quick solution to our problem, in exchange for a few minutes’ Googling.
In the case of a coding quandary, that solution is usually a snippet of code, or maybe a piece of third-party software. Free (or cheap), easy, already tested; the simplest, quickest, most cost-effective way to overcome the current roadblock.
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Would You Like Fries With That?
What business are you in? It’s a simple question, but one that a lot of people simply don’t know the answer to.
This isn’t about Nike being in the business of selling “aspiration”, or “performance”, or some other similarly nebulous concept. It’s about where you make your money.
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