Tuesday, February 28, 2006

“the secret path to the top” or Fast-Tracking My Career

Working Smart by Michael Hyaat has an excellent post on the secret path to the top or Fast Tracking My Career, His anwer to both is "RESPONSIVENESS"

Excerpt:

I'm not sure I could boil it down to one thing. Life isn’t usually that simple. But if I really, really had to boil it down to one thing, I would say this: responsiveness.

So many people I meet are unresponsive. They don’t return their phone calls promptly. They don’t answer their emails quickly. They don’t complete their assignments on time. They promise to do something and never follow through. They have to be reminded, prodded, and nagged. This behavior creates work for everyone else and eats into their own productivity. Sadly, they seem oblivious to it.

When I was a kid, we used to play “Tag.” The objective was simple: keep from becoming “It.” If someone tagged you (touched you), you became “it” until you tagged someone else. Whoever was “it” when the game ended, lost.

Business is very similar. People “tag” us in countless ways every day. They place calls. They send emails. They mention something to us in a meeting. Suddenly, we are “it.” And, just like the game, if you stay “it” too long, you lose. The only winning strategy is to respond quickly and make someone else “it.”

Reality is that we live in an “instant world.” People want instant results. They don’t want to wait. And if they have to wait on you, their frustration and resentment grows. They begin to see you as an obstacle to getting their work done. If that happens, it will begin to impact your reputation. Pretty soon people start saying, “I can never get a timely response from him,” or “When I send her an email, I feel like it goes into a black hole,” or worse, your colleagues just roll their eyes and sigh at the mention of your name.


Source: Working Smart

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Taking a day out...Seems look a good idea!

I need to take a day out soon!!!, I can feel my productivity reaching all time lows .

by Britt Parrott



Many people forget how routine their lives are. While this is especially true for those, like me, who have a regular 9-5 job, freelancers often get into their own routines, even while being less constrained by hours and location.

Doing the same thing over, day after day, contributes to creative blocks. Some might work through these blocks temporarily (by visiting sites such as this one), but it neglects the root cause of what got them into the block in the first place: routine.

I schedule a day out for myself as often as possible. I don’t call it a day off because those are usually taken for a specific purpose: a trip, work around the house, etc. For me, a day out is a way to temporarily break out of my routine. In the process, I usually get a boost of creativity.



[Via To-Done]

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Presentation Zen - Presentation documents and writing for non-writers

Good advice.....

"When in doubt, simplify." I so love this point by Scalzi that I'm quoting almost the entire passage here (item number nine in the list of ten):

"Worried you're not using the right words? Use simpler words. Worried that your sentence isn't clear? Make a simpler sentence. Worried that people won't see your point? Make your point simpler. Nearly every writing problem you have can be solved by making things simpler.



This should be obvious, but people don't like hearing it because there's the assumption that simple = stupid. But it's not true; indeed, I find from personal experience that the stupidest writers are the ones whose writing is positively baroque in form. All that compensating, you know. Besides, I'm not telling you to boil everything down to "see spot run" simplicity. I am telling you to make it so people can get what you're trying to say."

                                                              — John Scalzi


[Via Presentation Zen]

Monday, February 20, 2006

Seth Godin - A million little cuts

Think about it...What is happening in your org?

Most businesses don't fail dramatically.

They do it slowly.

But you wouldn't know that for sitting in at meetings or listening to speeches. Same is true, of course, for countries, non-profits and other organizations.

Human beings respond to emergencies. It's easy to get everyone to take action if we're in the middle of some sort of security crisis... but fixing the educational system isn't going to happen.

Faced with the gradual, inexorable decline that faces most organizations, it's just natural to try to fix the problem with a broad stroke. A big ad campaign or a new slogan or a totally redesigned website.

The answer, more likely than not, is to consistently and regularly stop the bleeding. To improve the boring stuff.

Organizations fail slowly. They often succeed fast, though. That's where the remarkable comes in. So, if I had to summarize it: You take a big step up... by being bold. But you avoid a slow death by getting every little thing right.


[Via Seth's Blog]

Tom Peters - The IMAOA

Check out this post at tom peters blog.



(In a way I'm stealing this from my old friend, the late Ren McPherson, legendary/Fortune Business Hall of Fame CEO of Dana Corporation, featured 100 years ago in In Search of Excellence. Ren used to say that, "The high-flyers will take care of themselves, and I'll eventually weed out the losers. My real job is to engage the 'middle 60 percent.' If I can induce a modest productivity boost from them, I can move mountains." I think he was right—and his track record surely supports that conclusion.)


Posted by Tom Peters |
Comments?


[Via The Tom Peters Weblog]

Friday, February 17, 2006

Thought provoking.....

Read this post by adam bosworth.....

Unlike many of my peers in the computer industry, I was a history major in college and have loved and read history ever since. I studied, in particular, the progressive era in history, an era when the industrial revolution evolved from the grim satanic mills of England into the modern industrial world. But the understanding I always had was that none of this would or could have been possible without the renaisaance and without the slow but sure rise of secular humanism and the spirit of scientific and intellectual inquiry that started at that time. After the fall of the Roman empire, in many ways the lights went out and, in the 14th century particularly, life in Europe hit a new low stroke the the terrible plague, the start of the mini ice age, and the wars between France and England. In the 15th century we saw the Spanish inquisition and the reconquista, but really, it was the last gasp of intolerant religious fanaticism and the spirit of inquiry and discovery from art to music to science was everywhere. The lights had been turned back on. As a child, growing up in New York City, I took for granted that mankind had learned these lessons. I assumed that mankind understood that freedom to think, to reason, and to experiment were paramount and that any irrational intolerant irrational beliefs that threatened these freedoms or, even worse, abused or injured people in the name of some mystical or fanatic cause were horrific reminders of the past.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

i hate itunes..

When i start itunes it takes up 100% of my resources i have a 2gb ram laptop and still when i turn on itunes, most other apps are not accessible ...the ones that are slow ...why is this?

I have had similar problem with firefox.

.....

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Communication....

A nice post at Tom Peters Blog

Excerpt
"the big idea/s": (1) We spend most of our time communicating. (2) Our career success or failure depends to an extraordinary degree on communications excellence ... or the lack thereof. (3) The overwhelming majority (perhaps 90 percent) of experimentally measured communication effectiveness comes from the "soft stuff" (do you project energy, etc, etc). (4) We rarely systematically "work on" communications effectiveness. (5) As leaders, we seldom have our troops work on their communications effectiveness. And (6) "Those who practice improve. Those who don't, don't."

Work Escape

At Feld Thoughts came across this web puzzle, quite good...see how long you last, i lasted 16.765 seconds...:)

ps: Just realised the similarity, this blog is called Rai's thoughts and that that blog is called Feld Thoughts...

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

RSS Reader that i want!

Excerpts from Get Real...

I am constantly fiddling around with RSS readers and various strategies for "RSS readering" -- William James remarked that you coin a new word at your own peril, so verbing "RSS reader" may be dangerous for me, but I do so with a plan.

I want to be an RSS reader: by which I mean to say that I would certainly rather (in theory) receive alerts about posts and -- perhaps even the posts themselves -- within some some window of time of their being posted. However, I haven't generally liked the various RSS readers I have tried. And I have tried gazillions.

I tried NewsGator integrated with Outlook when I was still (hiss) living on a Windows laptop. Yes, in principle I keep my email client open all day, and, yes, in some way getting email is similar to RSS-transmitted posts. But the email metaphor, of folders and messages doesn't quite jibe with my experience of browser mediated blog reading. So, ultimately, I dropped it.

The same is true of standalone RSS reader tools, like NetNewsWire and Fire. I tried them for a time, and then dropped out. These annoy me for similar reasons: I don't like the Pez dispenser feel, where all posts are like another, and you assume the role of a pigeon in a Skinner box, hitting the button to make the pellets roll out.

I have been lusting for something, a new solution, that actually parallels my most rewarding reading experiences.

Web 2.0 ....Online Word Processor...Blogging

i am submitting this blog post from the zoho writer ( http://www.zohowriter.com ) , so far the experience has been pretty good, nice product.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

The Art of Schmoozing...Guy

Guy Kawasaki Theory of Schmoozing version 1.0

Understand the goal.
Get out.
Ask good questions, then shut up
Unveil your passions
Read voraciously
Follow up
Make it easy to get in touch
Give favors
Ask for the return of favors