Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Email interrupts us all the time.  Just recovering from those interruptions and remembering what we were doing beforehand costs an entire workday every week, according to study cited in this interesting piece,  Breaking the email compulsion. The article pulls together several salient studies and makes a nice argument for why we like email so much: it gives us constant rewards.  In other words, Email is kind of like chocolate for the brain. We click the ‘check messages’ button and get a treat!

I know my brain works this way. I even like getting spam, in part because I can delete it quickly. The rest of my email sits there, in-box residue that builds up to guilt-inducing levels (will 5000 unfiled messages give the program a coronary? 10,000?).

The consultant who wrote this article, Suw Charman-Anderson, refers to this as operant conditioning, and says companies can take some steps to help workers change their habits and perhaps regain their brains, or at least some productivity.  She recommends things like scheduling daily email time (she notes that companies like Intel tried e-mail free days, but they didn’t work), turning off alert programs, and making sure that your email reader only gives you a subject and the first couple of lines of the email, so you can gauge its importance. She also recommends things like using instant messaging or Twitter.  That seems less practical to me — I have stopped following people who Twitter constantly because my phone was buzzing all the time with updates (I decided it was better to stop following because I stuck the phone in a drawer in the kitchen where it wouldn’t bother me, and missed some calls). I turn off IM much of the time because I want to get things done, not be interrupted. I only use it when I’m looking for specific people.  I keep Skype off much of the time for the same reason. Her recommendations on using blogs and wikis to collaborate make good sense to me.  She does talk about using Flickr as a form of communication, which was a new one on me.  I recommend the piece — and that you turn off your e-mail at least some of the time (I’ve had it off for the last hour. The office is strangely peaceful).

My friend Rivka Tadjer has just published her novel, Two Weeks Under, an exporation of just what we’ll do to look ‘perfect.’  Congrats, Rivka!  It sounds like a timely book, what with the cosmetic adjustments people now consider routine.

Fried Oreos overwhelm my palate, as I discovered when I was in Atlanta this weekend. The grease from the dough hangs out in the back of my throat, and boots any sweet residuals from the cookie right down to my stomach. But the people one table over from mine at the Glenwood Gastro Pub Saturday night could not get enough of them.

That made for kind of precursor for the talk I gave at the Society of Professional Journalists convention the following morning. I was part of a three-hour morning workshop on freelancing.  My job was to start us off by setting up the state of the market.

I feel like journalists are a little overwhelmed by the state of the market — the grease is just hanging around, booting all the good stuff going out of our gullets, making us feel like we’re in the maw of the mortuary for the profession.  So even though I titled my talk “It’s a great time to be a journalist — unless you have mortgage and kids,” I aimed to accentuate the positive.  It really is an exciting time to be in journalism, to have all these new ways to tell stories, to be able to engage in conversations with your audience about them, which can make journalism feel less abstract.

It is a lousy time for the business, especially print, and most prominently traditional newspapers in the West. But text isn’t going away.  We just haven’t figured out how to make money on it in a digital realm, or not with the profit margins of print.  Competition is also much broader on the Web, in a sense — from an advertiser’s perspective, journalists compete not just with blogs and social media sites and auction sites but with word processors and spreadsheets and security software!

The model will get worked out.  Journalism will survive.  Some parts of it will go the way of the town crier or the telegraph. But we’ll still be here, telling stories, making a difference, and making people want more.

Airport baggage carousels can provide telling glimpses of what’s happening in the economy. In 2004 I was waiting for my bags with a guy who was coming back from South Korea. His company was moving its factory — including all the specialized equipment in it — from Massachusetts to South Korea because the South Koreans had the expertise to run it, and the firm would increase profits a penny a part, even with the cost of moving the equipment and training the South Koreans to make it all work.

(I originally posted this as Offshoring Is So Over on Big Think)

At a tense press conference during a hostile takeover I covered as a young reporter, I got the last question. I asked the CEO of the company under siege to tell us a joke. “A joke?” he asked. “Yeah,” I said. “You’re supposed to be funny. Tell us a joke.”

Obviously, it could have been a disaster. But he whipped out a joke that not only made us laugh, it sent a message to the company pursuing his. He also made his own employees relax a bit — if the boss could tell a joke at a press conference, the takeover wasn’t going to kill them, either. I got compliments about that question for years (sadly, I didn’t have space to use the joke in my story, though the Chicago Tribune did).

Humor is a dangerous thing at work. My question could easily have backfired on me (I probably wouldn’t ask it now that I’m a grizzled veteran). His joke could’ve backfired on him. But even mild humor can help inspire people to work harder, be more creative, builds loyalty, improves health and seems to increase potential for wealth.

Thus starts the review I did of “The Levity Effect” on Big Think, Lighten Up, It’s Only Work .

Most of the book isn’t about becoming a CEO with a penchant for stand-up comedy. It’s more like the CEO as straight man, letting others have a little more fun.

For starters, they are no longer limited by physical boundaries. I use my local library, but it isn’t very big. It’s part of a regional network of libraries, which helps for borrowing books, but for academic articles, which I sometimes need, I’m pretty much out of luck. Only I’m not, as I learned from this piece on public libraries by Hiawatha Bray in the Boston Globe. I’m kicking myself a bit, because I never thought to look into Boston’s public library when I needed access to certain kinds of research. I will now.

Wow, am I behind on my posts. Blogging for money has sapped my energy for this blog.

Here’s my latest Prototype column in the New York Times, Turning Point for Touch Screens. It’s on touch screen technology and whether it’s finally going mainstream, thanks to the iPhone.

And, while I’m at it, here’s the one before that, Finding and Fixing a Home’s Power Hogs. That one was probably the most popular column I’ve written for the NYT — it made the top 10 most emailed list.

Here it is, the last page on the Net. This must be what the guy in the old ISP commercial (was it Comcast? Verizon DSL? Earthlink? I forget) found. Thanks to Cruz for sending this my way.

A book site says that “Oh, The Places You’ll Go” is one of the 100 best business books of all time. This sparked me to think about the Kindergartener’s Guide to Business.

I’m not sure if “Oh, The Places You’ll Go” really qualifies as a business book. Maybe as a motivational guide. But I do think “The House at Pooh Corner” has plenty to say about corporate life. It has Tigger, the epitome of the unmanageable employee (and aspiring CEO), Rabbit in all his micromanaging, scheming splendor, Pooh at his earnest best, fending off corporate Heffalumps with his trembling sidekick Piglet, and the Eeyores and Owls that inhabit companies everywhere. Christopher Robin, the actual CEO, appears periodically to clean up messes (a nice change of pace from today’s headlines).

I’m open to suggestions here. What other children’s books tell us something about work?

Over vacation I read Rainbows End, the newest novel by Vernor Vinge. It’s been out since 2006 and reviewed extensively, so I’ll limit myself to a few thoughts.
His main character is ostensibly Robert Gu, a poet who should’ve died of dementia and other brain ailments, but is cured by biotech advances, and comes back as something of a cross between Valentine in “Stranger in a Strange Land” and Babbitt, the self-satisfied semi-hero of Sinclair Lewis’s novel, who slips into crisis. Gu’s crisis is the same as any writer — he wonders if he’s lost his skill. Apparently Gu has never had such doubts before.  that’s almost unbelievable for a writer, but it’s a minor quibble. A bigger issue is that he’s somehow become technologically proficient (I’m guessing Vinge isn’t so good at poetry, which wouldn’t advance the plot, either.).

More interesting are  the characters we don’t really get to know, especially Rabbit. It’s a little frustrating to read a book in which the main character is actually offstage for almost the entire novel.  But so Vinge has set it up.

The best character we actually get to see is the San Diego metro area itself. It has become something like a Second Life version of itself, with people putting their own ’skins’ on the landscape.  Vinge paints this well, and it feels like it could be real by 2025.
All in all, I found Rainbows End a fun summer read, though somewhat unsatisfying, since he leaves all sorts of plot lines dangling, presumably for a sequel.

On my Big Think blog, I posted some thoughts on what it means for business.