Tom's blog

When there is too much to do.

We all have times when there are simply too many things on the todo list, or the number of task-list-postit notes reaches enough to be a pad. Recently, having been feeling the pain, there are a few things that I have started to do to remove some of the noise from my daily grind. Things like, cleaning out my RSS news feed, limiting my exposure to extraneous email and some task tracking system changes. These changes are showing some promise already.

Brian Oberkirch has written a post on this very topic that holds not only these rules, but some even more interesting ideas. I especially like the idea of IM office hours...

His post is here: Trimming the attention sails at Like It Matters

Enjoy.

TC.

Technorati Tags: business, collaboration, life

Try this test

After writing about Imus and his apparent lens earlier today, I remembered that Malcolm Gladwell wrote about some interesting things in his book, Blink. One of the things that he mentions is the Implicit Association Test, which will test your natural racial bias.

You can try one here at Harvards Project Implicit. Be ready, you may not like what you find.

TC.

Don Imus and an interesting double standard

Don Imus was fired. NBC decided to gently exit stage left and put a little space between the organization and the now radioactive, long time broadcast personality as advertisers started dropping like flies.

Now, Don really did make some pretty ignorant comments that shouldn't really have a place in any conversation and in all honesty, he probably should have been released many years ago by NBC, but this whole situation does expose a pretty interesting double standard.

First, if Howard Stern had made those same comments, not only would it have not made the news, but it would have been almost expected by the majority of his listeners. Second, if you have ever been exposed to a rap video on cable, the artists [if you would describe them as such] are using this kind of language and intent to support the multi-billion dollar industry. Why should we be surprised when it is almost considered a normal colloquialism?

Yet, Don Imus got fired. Perhaps every broadcaster or provider of entertainment should be taking a similar viewpoint to that of NBC, and make a bold statement to show that stereotyping, racism, sexism etc is unacceptable in public media by not carrying it or promoting it. But that would also mean turning away piles of cash...so I doubt it will ever happen.

TC.

Don't forget to take a backup.

So today CNN reported that the White House had managed to lose something like 5 million emails. Impressive, now I would have thought that an organization like that would have a pretty good IT department.

The infrastructure to support an organization like the White House will not be insignificant, lots of redundant servers, all with their own copies of these emails. The email loss apparently affects the email from some 1700 White House core staff.

In contrast, I work in an office where we have around 50 employees and we have two email servers (a primary and a backup) and probably 20 other various servers doing different things. We also keep daily backups, and remember thats just for 50 people and for activities that are not nearly as important as matters related to the security of the United States and the Economy etc.

It makes you wonder how they were able to "lose" these emails from all of these different servers. The questions begs to be asked; What happened to the redundant servers and the backups?

But wait there's more. Apparently these are the emails that are already under question, due to accusations of improper use of White House facilities by Mr. Karl Rove and the RNC.

Lets review: 5 million missing emails, no backups, no redundant servers and no more proof of any wrongdoing by Mr. Karl Rove (or is that M C Rove).

Can anyone else smell the fish?

TC.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, Politics

When the conversation stops (or didn't start...)

I really will never understand why people are surprised when bad things occur because the conversation stops, or in some cases didn't start.

This can be seen everywhere, in politics, the work place or even at home. Here is the perfect example, Nancy Pelosi and some other folks went to the Middle East and met with a number of people from other countries to discuss many of the huge issues that face the world today, most of whom have a very different viewpoint from that of the US.

On their return, that group of politicians came under a lot of fire for even starting the conversation and are now being criticized for reputedly screwing the conversation up...but here a thing...no one else is having any conversation with these folks about any of the issues. So which is the bigger screw up?

I believe it would be much better for everyone if more conversations were happening, particularly if within those conversations, everyone was listening and really trying to understand. Then there might be less wars, less tension, fewer frustrated employees or fewer broken marriages etc.

Just a thought.

TC.

Technorati Tags: business, collaboration, life, Politics