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The McDonalds in my town is going to close down for several months. During that time, they are going to tear down the current restaurant and build a new one. The man who owns the McDonalds has another one in a nearby town and he did something similar there a few years ago. Still, it seems like quite a leap of faith to shut down your successful business and the cash flow for a few months in order to be able to serve more customers in the future. When the iPod Mini was at the peak of its popularity, Apple stopped making it and instead switched to the flash-based iPod Nano. On one hand, it didn't make sense. They had a successful product that had increasing demand, but they stopped making it … [Read more...] about Killing off Success to Prepare for the Future

This weekend I was talking to a couple who had moved to Kansas City about a year ago. They had just decided to move back to the small town where we live. I asked what they thought about living in the "big city" and while they liked most of it, they said the commute time was simply too great. They had moved to Kansas City to be closer to their jobs, but the husband still spent 1.5 hours and often a bit longer each way just getting to and from work. He wasn't necessarily traveling very far, but with traffic, he was spending 3+ hours a day on the road. While his commute time was definitely above average, it isn't too unusual. In 2006, Midas had a contest to find the person with the longest … [Read more...] about Productivity-Draining Commute

We recently purchased a new vehicle. I don't particularly like car shopping, but the process of trying to decide what features/capabilities were important to us was interesting. In this post, I wanted to list some of the factors we considered that relate to productivity and time savings with a new car: 1. Range and Fuel Capacity The time you spend at the pump is time you can't spend doing something else. Most people look at the MPG a vehicle gets but fewer people look at how far they can get on a single fill-up. Depending on what your time is worth, a vehicle that has a longer range, but just slightly lower MPG, may be more efficient for you, personally, because the more frequent … [Read more...] about Productivity-Based Vehicle Shopping

When you have kids, it's hard not to notice the correlation between their outputs (behavior, etc.) and their inputs (what they watch on TV, whom they play with, etc.). We don't watch very much television in our family. When we do watch something, we generally try to use educational programming (for example, a Nova video about lightning.) I found our kids are typically very interested in these types of videos and are engaged and asking questions about what is being said and shown. However, they are only engaged and interested when they haven't watched any "entertainment-style" programming. If they have seen a cartoon recently, they aren't nearly as interested in the educational content. My … [Read more...] about Television and Training a Productive Mind

I was recently at a show in Branson, Missouri where a juggler was performing as the pre-show. As part of his act, he called a kid up from the audience to supposedly teach him how to juggle. The kid struggled at first, but eventually got three balls going through a single cycle and caught them without dropping any. Then the music started, the kid threw the balls in the air and started doing amazing juggling tricks. The original juggler told everyone that the kid was actually his son. He explained that when his son was 8 or 9, all he wanted to do was watch television. The father couldn't get him to do anything else. Finally he made a rule: For every hour you spend juggling, you can watch … [Read more...] about Juggling or Television

The two things I've spent the most time studying are software engineering and music composition. While they seem to be very different fields of study, large-scale works in either area rely on one very important common skill: the ability to manage complexity. In software, you know that your complexity is out of control when it becomes harder and harder to make changes as the size of the code base grows. In music, complexity is out of control when your piece becomes less and less coherent as it grows in length and instrumentation. It wouldn't surprise me if other fields are similar. Once you get the basic skills and semantics out of the way, the biggest thing that determines whether or … [Read more...] about Dealing with Complexity

A group of scientists were given a number of rats to test on mazes. Scientists just love running rats through mazes. Anyway, half the rats were normal. They were told that the other half were "super rats bred to be much smarter than normal rodents. In another experiment, teachers were given a classroom of students. Half of the students were normal and half had an abnormally high IQ. Neither of these experiments were designed to test students or rats. They had already been tested. All of the rats were just normal lab rats and all of the students were normal school children. There was no significant difference between the intelligence of the two groups of rats or between the two groups of … [Read more...] about Managing Others’ Perceptions

A paperless office sounds wonderful, but becoming paperless is a very poor goal. Becoming paperless is a side effect of creating an efficient workflow. If you set out to create a paperless office, you'll find that there are all kinds of scanners and software to help you move your files from paper format to digital files, but just changing out your filing cabinet for hard drives doesn't automatically make you more efficient. The reason so many people pursue a paperless office is because it is easy to understand. It isn't hard to understand the idea of reading files on the computer instead of on paper. Workflow improvements are a lot harder to visualize, but if you are trying to actually … [Read more...] about Paperless–The Wrong Goal

Back when the Ford Motor company was first mass-producing automobiles, they did a number of experiments in how to get the best productivity out of people. They found that a 40-hour week was pretty much the sweet spot. If people worked more than 40 hours, the amount they produced per hour started decreasing. As a result, 40-hour weeks seemed like the best way to get the most out of employees. Now days, it isn't uncommon for people to be working 60- to 70-hour weeks as a normal schedule. On one hand, this makes sense. Maybe 40 hours of the type of labor that was being done at Ford was more exhausting than sitting at a desk. On the other hand, the work being done at Ford on the assembly line … [Read more...] about Is a 40-Hour Week Good for Productivity?

Being organized is a cornerstone of being productive. However, there is a lot more to being organized than just having a clean desk. True organization is a mental state and a way of thinking. An organized desk is often a side effect, but too many people focus on trying to look organized instead of actually being organized. If you want to BE organized and not just LOOK organized, it requires you to spend some time really thinking about how you approach work and dealing with things. You can't short cut this just by picking things up and putting them out of sight. Here are some tips for becoming truly organized. Recognize that being organized isn't about trying to get more things to … [Read more...] about Organization Mentality