Made with Paper
We are conditioned and soft wired to believe that working harder by clocking hours will equal professional and business success. And maybe that is true in the industrial and corporate world were presence and obedience has been rewarded over rule-breaking and innovation.
But applying same work values and behavior in the mobile economy will only make you slower and heavier, resulting in obsolete and bloated solutions. The best path to ensure innovation is to switch to a value-based model where the focus is switched from time spent and worked to real value created.
Focusing on the endgame - value creation - from an employee, consulting or entrepreneurial perspective will create new dynamics that will accelerate results, insights and success. Projects will become smaller and iterative. The iterative process will strengthen collaboration within and across teams and networks.
Customers will benefit from simpler products introduced faster to market, participating in the product development cycle via usage and feedback. In this world there is no place for traditional marketing, one-way messaging to talk up the product. The product is the message.
This is great news for humanity; maybe not so good for old behemoths.
I very recently joined in on a Twitter conversation about work triggered by the article “Why We Have to Go Back to a 40-Hour Work Week to Keep Our Sanity” published on AlterNet. It argues that longer hours kills profit, productivity and employees. Something I wholeheartedly agree with.
Despite cultural, social and technological advance we work more and not less which I find ironic. It obviously depends on how we define work. Is it as narrow as a 9-5 office life or as wide as raising a family? In the context of finding work-life balance the definition becomes really clear. Work is everything but life.
The Fast Company article “Strive For Work-Life Integration, Not Balance” is scratching the surface of a new way of looking at life without daring to go much deeper. It’s still grounded in an old school industrial view on work and how it defines you by a culture that asks the question: What do you do?
My wife and I started to rethink how we should design our lives when we had our first son two years ago. We had both left our more traditional employments at a very successful Silicon Valley startup and an iconic tech institution respectively the year before.
We asked ourselves the question: Is it possible to design a life around our growing family instead of around an ossified concept of work? Well, we live in the most creative, empowering and innovative time so why shouldn’t we be able to disrupt and change the way we work the same way we are changing banking, health, communication, shopping, education et cetera. Must an accelerating world mean that you also have to run faster and longer?
So we decided to both be stay-at-home parents and alternate working on interesting projects where we could leverage our respective talents, passions and create high-end value. I ventured into teaching and my wife investment banking.
Not to scare anyone off but it’s been very hard as most new ventures are. We look upon ourselves as a startup and try to operate really lean, iterate often and collaborate with our networks. We are rethinking our personal business model, staying away from unnecessary debt and frivolous consumption. Any startup knows that key to long-term survival is to bootstrap. Only take on debt when there is a clear path to accelerated growth.
We approached this experiment by turning off everything and reinventing our lives from scratch. What really matters on a daily basis? We quickly got rid of all industrial junk: TV, news, stationary phones, newspapers, mail, grocery shopping and anything advertising related. We replaced driving with walking for the obvious health benefits. We started to source all our food locally and cook everything from scratch. We designed a home office where we could each do bursty work a couple of hours or more per day pending project. We got rid of anything that demanded regular maintenance. We only work with smart, focused and nice people on fun projects. We stopped trying to fit into the statistical normal and started living.
Most people forget that they have 16 hours / day available to do whatever after a healthy 8 hour night of sleep. Those 16 hours can be wasted on commuting, multitasking or endless meetings, or on real value-added doing. They could also be used for healthy idleness.
The cool thing is that we are connecting with more and more people that think the same and that we have started to collaborate with, even do business with. People that are tired of business as usual, corporate career climbing, politics, titles, busy work and big egos. In the end of the day it’s about having a great life, not to win the competition of who owns the must stuff.
What having a great life means is a very personal decision despite the monolithic social contemporary consensus that it’s about extrinsic values and rewards. The industrial era treated humans as machines, as we could be taken apart and fixed if anything broke. It’s time to reclaim humanity and I think we see that happing across the world today via all different kinds of initiatives, from crowd-sourced projects to peer-2-peer initiatives, local movements and the new era of craftsmanship.
Work is about deliver high-value by working less; it’s about contributing to the world where you give more than you take; it’s about collaboration, fulfillment and personal growth.
There is a certain pleasure in setting up a new iPad, only keeping the apps used on a daily and weekly basis. Nothing fancy or eclectic; they all work to get the job done and leave some room for entertainment.
I bought the first iPad almost 2 years ago as productivity tool for my travels and lectures. Back then, the general mainstream media consensus viewed the iPad as a playful toy designed for leisurely media consumption at best.
As I never listen to the statistical normal I decided to bring only the iPad on trips and work to see what it could and couldn’t do but also envision how this would change over time.
I wrote four blog posts about this experience back in 2010 with the conclusion that it works and when it doesn’t the creative mind will find practical workarounds.
As I’m awaiting the delivery of the new iPad in a few days I’ve been contemplating how technology is changing the way we work, or rather how we can utilize technology in smart ways so that we can design work around our desired lifestyle.
I’ve been able to change not only the way I work but also what I do thanks to technology. That has impacted how I use technology in creating superior value and spending less time “working”.
Work has morphed into an artisan and artistic experience like cooking. To be able to cook I need to have an idea or a recipe of what to make, sources the ingredients, prepare them, find an audience (easier than you think) and then cook. It also includes doing dishes, cleaning up and critiquing the experience.
Once I divided up what I really do - researching, reading, thinking, writing, talking, advising and lecturing - into smaller activities it became easier to find the right tools to make these tasks faster and less time-consuming using technology.
I wanted all of these activities to work from anywhere, anytime and anyhow (across both iOS and OSX). Here are a few highlights:
The above activities and tools solves anywhere and anyhow but not anytime. Time is scarce and should not be valued in money but in experience, growth and fulfillment. I’m the most productive in the early mornings and before lunch. That’s when I need to schedule thinking and writing, activities that takes a lof of attention and focus.
I try to schedule my different activities around my immediate environment (family, friends, lectures, travels et cetera) to reach a state of productive flow and zero friction. This I might add, has been very hard but is becoming easier - as with most things - the more I practice.
We have had over 100 years of practice in how to fit into the workings of the industrial era and office life; it’s to be expected that working in the networked, self-employed world will take both time, focus and effort. Be patient and have some faith - we live in the best of times!
The always-on mobile world is liberating us from location, time and ownership. Anything that we could ever think of is now just one click away, resting firmly in our pockets and in a not too distant future hacked right into our bodies and even our minds.
I can do pretty much anything from anywhere which means that a permanent residency, office or store location matters less and less. My mobile device has become the extension of my thoughts, ideas and needs. It’s how I interact with high-friction activities like shopping, booking flight tickets and getting work done. One-click.
The always-on mobile world is changing the way we live, play, work and think dramatically. I need fewer things to do more. I can combine family, play and work so that it works with my desired lifestyle. This will cut my costs dramatically and enable increased revenues.
By getting liberated from the shackles of space and time we also become liberated from stuff; physical things that we were forced to own and carry around due to lack of more effective business models. A trip from San Francisco to London can be as light-weight as a bus ride downtown (which I did once but that’s another blog post).
This is fantastic news for our communities that will grow closer thanks to sharing, for the environment as we need to produce less damaging physical stuff and for ourselves as we can live more cost-effective and liberated lives.
This might sound like a nightmare for the obese pack rat or the obsessive possessive. But the truth is that human beings have owned very few things all-through history and it wasn’t until after WWII - when the industrial production-centric era kicked in full gear - that we started to expand our ownership in the quest for social status, progress and perceived happiness - or just cause we could. We also decreased usable public spaces for the benefit of the privately owned.
The expression “He who dies with the most toys, wins!” is both ironic and very true. That changes as we are leaving the industrial era behind and are embracing a more experience-driven time. The era of hyper-consumption has created a very powerful global counter trend of simplicity, de-cluttering and demand for zero friction. TV advertising has turned from informative signals to insular noise, disrupting thought processes and experiences. No-one likes it - anymore.
Zero friction is replacing convenience as one of the key drivers for consumption. A store’s proximity matters less and less as I’m living in a location-free world. What I care about is a frictionless experience that can free up - as apposed to save me - time, attention and energy for experiences and learnings that really matter to me.
Our lives will never be the same again and what an awesome thought that is.
The fastest way to making more money in the corporate world is to become a manager and start rising through the ranks. Basically it means that you now are telling other people what to do in endless meetings. A corporation assumes that people needs to me managed - and in some cases micro-managed - and is therefore happy to pay for what is becoming more and more a very questionable service.
But is it possible to make more by working less instead of harder and smarter, and challenge the centuries old protestant work ethic? And what does smarter and harder really mean in practicality? I think most people would define smarter as being more effective and harder as putting in a lot of time-consuming effort and persevere perceived hardships.
But is that really the core meaning of work? To work smarter or harder? I would think it’s to leverage our unique talents and passions to create high-paying value. If we start focusing on a desired outcome and result instead of the input and effort we would both save time and a lot of sweat.
A lot of things we do and many tasks that’s being done within corporations have zero to negative value. It’s busy work at best and bankruptcy work at worst. It slows us down, makes us focus on the trivial and loose sight of the endgame.
The goal for me has always been to free up time that I can spend on new learnings, innovative ideas and leisure. I strive for an empty calendar with the right few meetings, an empty inbox and no todo list. I value my time - especially with family - extremely high as it’s the only thing in life I cannot buy more of.
Postponing your non-work dreams until retirement is a faulty concept; it’s not going to be the same as when you felt the earth-shattering passion to explore as a young, fearless and untethered soul. Roaming Europe on a cane while popping Lipitor is not the same as on a skateboard.
I think you can work smart, hard and less by switching your focus from racking up billable hours to creating high-value outcomes. The key is to understand what real value a project will create and how you can leverage your talents to achieve that goal. If you cannot add a financial value on the project then it’s not work. That’s the best tactic to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I’ve learned that charging for value but managing my time is the most effective way to reach this goal. Cyril Parkinson said “work expands so as to fill the time available for it’s completion”. Then assigning less time to a project should give the same result, maybe even better as scarcity forces you to think smarter and work harder.
Think about it: the average American “works” 7.5hrs per day and commutes about 1-2 hours to the office. Add time to get ready in the morning and cool down in the evening and we have 10-12 hours dedicated to work. Does all that time add real value? Hardly. A big part is consumption of gas, clothes, food et cetera. Another is endless meetings and a small part creates real tangible value.
I’ve tried to cut out all the hour-long meetings, all the busy work and the commute by re-thinking, removing and re-prioritizing what really matters. I constantly think about how I can do things smarter, faster and cheaper by leveraging mobile technologies and reducing friction. It’s hard but not impossible and very rewarding.
Working less is good for our health, our family, our relationships and us as individual human beings. And I think it can even be good for our bank accounts if done right. But you have to dare to go against the mainstream that still believes that to be accepted in society and be successful you should work hard, be busy, feel stressed and guilty.
My wife asked me the other day what made me proactively seek out physical activity. Was it the weather, discretionary time or my Fitbit motion tracker? I had no insightful and thought-through answer.
But the more I thought about it I realized that I’ve always - despite being an introvert - enjoyed physical activity. Not necessarily team sports but definitely going for a walk, playing tennis or catching some waves. I deeply understand how important daily physical activity is to my mind, body and soul and am very motivated to stay healthy and feel good.
I decided to use Fogg’s Behavioral Model (BFM) to to try to find a satisfying answer. The core motivator I’m feeling when doing physical activity is pleasure & pain. I’ve never really cared about hope & fear or to be socially accepted or rejected. I dig my own path.
But key to this model is to have the ability to exercise on a daily basis and that’s when I think time - or rather planning and prioritizing - is a challenge as well as when I let it become a non-routine.
The short-term trigger to me over the past year has been the Fitbit motion tracker as it tracks when I move and am sedentary. The first week’s usage chocked me as it showed a very sedentary lifestyle which has proven lethal to our health. I quickly decreased time infront of the computer and increased my daily physical activities.
I think most sane people are motivated and have the ability but lack the right triggers. Through products like Fitbit, Nike Fuelband and Jawbone Up tracking, measuring and analyzing our physical activity has become extremely simple and rewarding.
I think today my answer to what makes me seek out physical activity would have been that it’s a combination of both conditions (motivation), discretionary time (ability) and a way to trigger my motivation via real insights and instant gratification.
It’s amazing how the simplest things in life can create an enormous quality of life.
Anyone charging their clients per time spent on or deliverables for project instead of value created should have their head examined. It’s probably the worst business model ever created, forcing hoards of consultants, knowledge workers, corporate drones and clients to do and accept work that is bloated, full with project creeps and being executed so slow that it should be illegal.
The whole point with hiring an individual or a company is to solve an important, urgent and valuable problem as fast and effectively as possible. This runs obviously counter to dragging out the process by counting hours and adding deliverables.
Charging for added value benefits both client and project leader as the focus shifts from time to objective and desired outcome. This mind-shift changes the dynamics in favor of a much better result for both parties. They both gain speed, time and focus which will translate into good business for both.
Charging for time in an always-on, realtime and mobile world makes you a sure winner in the race to the bottom. Startups have understood this by combining pay for time and long-term collective value-add via salary and stock options. But it’s only an interim model that will soon stop working as change accelerates.
I strongly believe that the above is essential to understand and develop as we are gravitating towards a world with the entrepreneur-of-one. Bootstrapping is necessary but leveraging your knowledge to create superior value, increase long-term revenues and free up time for research, reflections and leisure is going to be key. More about this in future posts.
I’ve been without news for a week and I feel fine. The desire to click on New York Times, Yahoo! or any other news outlet is slowly subsiding. Technological change is one directional, so is simplicity.
I think we spend too much time, attention and energy trying to catch up instead of slowing doing to think. We are plugged into the broadcast machine 24/7 via newspapers, radio, TV and the Internet. And most of it is just junk, junk designed to make us buy more junk. Clay Johnson says it well, “News is to the mind what sugar is to the body”.
So how do I plan to stay in the know? I will follow smart, insightful people that I trust and let them curate. I’ll let the really great stuff bubble up to the surface and read it at my leisure. And I will read awesome books.
Does anyone need broadcast media anymore? What started out as a public service has now become a toxic wasteland of opinions for sale and evil demagoguery. It has all become biased to win the battle of who gets to tell their story for maximized financial gain. News is no longer different from selling diapers, tooth paste or junk food.
I don’t need that to live, survive and thrive. I need smart insights and tangible knowledge from people I trust. I need thought-provoking ideas from openminded, data-driven people. I need honest, authenticate and transparent knowledge.
I’m not afraid of the silence.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to rethink the book authoring process, how to make it more open and collaborative with the goal of sharing the right content and reaching the right audience. Here are a few thoughts:
I’ve always had the idea about writing a book on the subject of Work but what really ignited the process were two talks I held in Los Angeles and São Paulo. The feedback was very encouraging and it was a great way to understand which of my many insights and experiences mattered and which that didn’t.
After I wrote the outline I decided to share it via Twitter and my Tumblr blog for feedback but also as a way of letting people know what I’m up to, why I don’t answer phone calls and seem to spend a lot of time inside my head. ;)
Once I started to talk about the book project a few people in my network reached out to more actively participate and offer their thoughts and feedback. It’s critical to get other people’s perspective and thoughts to avoid second-guessing but also to add inspiration. It really takes a community to write a book.
I’m now ready to share the drafted introduction to get feedback to test the proof of concept. I intend to - just like when I’ve worked in startups - to iterate to improve quality. In the end of the day, this book is the product of many ideas, some that will work and some that might not. But without prototyping I will never know.
![I finished reading the brilliant book Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything by F.S. Michaels yesterday. It argues - and rightfully so - that we live in a world where one single perspective has become the sole driving force behind everything. That perspective is the economic story. In the current mind-numbing paradigm we believe that the market can solve all our human problems and anything that cannot be defined within this limited view is not worth pursuing.
We are conditioned to believe that we are purely consumers and encouraged (well, really not) to vote with our wallets. We should dutifully except products that are only good enough and not great as that is what it means to be a great and patriotic [insert any nationality].
The solution, says F.S Michaels is not to single-handedly fight the economic story but to create parallell structures, like the Slow Food Movement that started in Italy and spread across the world. Slow Food is a real people movement, not a consumer group. It’s about growing, cooking and eating real food and in the human tradition enjoying the intrinsic rewards: pleasure, happiness, friendship and health.
By understanding how powerful this story is and how it changes the way we think, act and interact we can rethink and innovate our lives as individuals and human beings. When I read the book I came up with dosens of ideas for new projects that could be developed into parallell structures.
I mentioned this in a tweet to F.S Michaels and she responded, asking how it can be applied to disruption and innovation. [How thrilling isn’t it to have the author of the book you just read respond to you within hours.]
Reading the book opened up my mind to the thought of how we can redesign and rethink our society so that it becomes more human. The reason lots of people are technophobic is that we used technology during the industrial era in a very dehumanizing and passive way. We now have an opportunity to change that and the networked world is ushering in different kind of rules and values: honesty, authenticity and transparency.
I like to think that all the new collaborative tools created by very creative startup teams is a parallel structure, enabling us to combine the economic story with more individual freedom. The same goes for the cottage industries and crowd-sourced projects that are evolving across the world. Projects that would never see the light of day in the traditional, industrial economic story but are emerging as parallell structures.
My personal contribution is the upcoming book Working The Future where I argue that we need to switch from passively accepting how we should live our lives to actively hack our lives to create our desired lifestyles. Note that these are not lifestyles defined by brands, advertising and marketing but by ourselves and what matters to us.
It’s looking at the world as open source and building on top of what have already been created; adapting, altering and adding new value so that it works for you and possible for many more.
The best way of “innovating” the economic story is to give away your best ideas for free, to share them with the world to encourage critical thinking, conversation and human progress. It’s very hard to shut down a great idea that turns into a global movement. I’m saying that knowing that history is littered with examples of the contrary. But maybe this time it’s different?](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzsxpuM18K1qzo7xqo1_400.png)
I finished reading the brilliant book Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything by F.S. Michaels yesterday. It argues - and rightfully so - that we live in a world where one single perspective has become the sole driving force behind everything. That perspective is the economic story. In the current mind-numbing paradigm we believe that the market can solve all our human problems and anything that cannot be defined within this limited view is not worth pursuing.
We are conditioned to believe that we are purely consumers and encouraged (well, really not) to vote with our wallets. We should dutifully except products that are only good enough and not great as that is what it means to be a great and patriotic [insert any nationality].
The solution, says F.S Michaels is not to single-handedly fight the economic story but to create parallell structures, like the Slow Food Movement that started in Italy and spread across the world. Slow Food is a real people movement, not a consumer group. It’s about growing, cooking and eating real food and in the human tradition enjoying the intrinsic rewards: pleasure, happiness, friendship and health.
By understanding how powerful this story is and how it changes the way we think, act and interact we can rethink and innovate our lives as individuals and human beings. When I read the book I came up with dosens of ideas for new projects that could be developed into parallell structures.
I mentioned this in a tweet to F.S Michaels and she responded, asking how it can be applied to disruption and innovation. [How thrilling isn’t it to have the author of the book you just read respond to you within hours.]
Reading the book opened up my mind to the thought of how we can redesign and rethink our society so that it becomes more human. The reason lots of people are technophobic is that we used technology during the industrial era in a very dehumanizing and passive way. We now have an opportunity to change that and the networked world is ushering in different kind of rules and values: honesty, authenticity and transparency.
I like to think that all the new collaborative tools created by very creative startup teams is a parallel structure, enabling us to combine the economic story with more individual freedom. The same goes for the cottage industries and crowd-sourced projects that are evolving across the world. Projects that would never see the light of day in the traditional, industrial economic story but are emerging as parallell structures.
My personal contribution is the upcoming book Working The Future where I argue that we need to switch from passively accepting how we should live our lives to actively hack our lives to create our desired lifestyles. Note that these are not lifestyles defined by brands, advertising and marketing but by ourselves and what matters to us.
It’s looking at the world as open source and building on top of what have already been created; adapting, altering and adding new value so that it works for you and possible for many more.
The best way of “innovating” the economic story is to give away your best ideas for free, to share them with the world to encourage critical thinking, conversation and human progress. It’s very hard to shut down a great idea that turns into a global movement. I’m saying that knowing that history is littered with examples of the contrary. But maybe this time it’s different?
[video]
“To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.” —
— Henry Ford
[Quotation from Everything is a Remix by Kirby Ferguson.]
I’ve been experimenting with hacking my life for a few years now. The idea was that I could design a really great work-live-play lifestyle that leveraged my passions and talents, delivered superior value and making it work with a growing family - outside of the corporate monoculture.
After a very appreciated talk I did at Soho House in Los Angeles for a bunch of Hyper Island master class students in the end of last year, I grew confident that I had enough learnings, insights and intelligence to write a book.
I started to write the book in January, getting up at 5am to get a few hours of solitude and tranquility to collect my thoughts and transform them into words, sentences and paragraphs. I then took a break for a week for a few talks in São Paulo. There I shared my latest outline and content to similar accolades.
My ambition is to write an inspirational book about how to leverage technology and reclaim the right to design our own lifestyles. I started this journey in 2005 after leaving Yahoo! and think I’ve mostly figured out how to make it work for my growing family. There is no magic bullet, just small everyday steps.
Above is the presentation deck that I’ve been using, outlining the 7 chapters I’m currently writing. Feel free to comment. I’ll share more as I’m progressing.