Today’s post at Productive Flourishing, Charlie Gilkey’s blog about productivity, was written by Ali Hale, who gets paid to write blog posts. She writes about a woman’s approach to the Cult of Productivity, in which everything is counted and optimized, often at the expense of experiences that don’t quantify well. Ali suggests (excessive) “counting” is a masculine approach to productivity. Certainly, it is a left-brain skill.

I like to count; I feel a little better when I start a week with fewer items on my to-do list (287 this week) than the week before (316). I also recognize sometimes I will manipulate the numbers by not adding items to the list until I do the weekly clearing of completed items. This would be cheating if I were a public company. I counted LOC (lines of code, a unit of measure in the software industry) for years.

I’m all for maximizing the use of my time, and I regularly (and probably legitimately) multi-task. Much of what was traditionally “women’s work” (sewing, knitting, housework) supports concurrent conversation. OTOH, one story has stuck with me for several years:

A young boy gave a report at school:

If you (do this productivity thing) regularly, you’ll save fifteen minutes a day, and at the end of the year, you’ll have an extra 3 1/2 days saved up!*

Even though most of us in the trade will argue that time compounds, we all have to admit that saving time doesn’t work quite the same way saving money does.

But I do catch myself verifying. For example, is flossing worth the bother? When the payoff was a bit less time with the hygienist, the long-term benefit wasn’t so clear. When a friend died of a heart attack, very young, and I knew dental problems may have been a factor, I rethought the equation.

Allow one minute a day for flossing.
365×1x(50 years**) = 18250 adult lifetime minutes = 304 hours = 12.6 days.

Lost time recovering from open heart surgery***:
At least 3 months for the patient alone, not counting time lost by the family.

Flossing is the more productive use of time.

*Both Andrew Tobias and StoryPeople have been asked if they are the source of the story and denied authorship; I’d love to know who wrote this story.

**Allowing that many people have that “wake up and smell the coffee” moment around age 30.

***While once-a-day flossing is “good enough,” the equation works even for people who floss three times a day. There’s no guarantee that a person would only have one major heart surgery.

There’s a simple solution to the non-words “umm” and “uhh” in public speaking:  it is virtually impossible to “umm” and “uhh” when you are making eye contact with a specific person.

Umms and uhhs happen when you look at your notes, the wall, the ceiling, the floor, or a crowd. They never happen while you are looking directly at another person’s eyes. Try it for yourself. Observe how people make eye contact when they speak, or don’t, at the next meeting you attend.

If you’re on the phone, and more importantly, when you are recording the call for subsequent distribution (and posterity!), look at a picture of a real person. (Caveat: make sure the person in the picture is someone who elicits appropriate vocabulary for the call. You don’t want to accidentally slip into baby talk during a marketing presentation.) In a pinch, speaking to a drink bottle or a coffee cup, pretending it has eyes, will do, but a picture of a real person is better.

Dogs cooperate more than cats.

The first time you try to make eye contact with a real person when and every time you speak, your eyes will hurt by the end of the day. Then, you’ll start noticing how few people make eye contact all the time.

Spread the word. Make eye contact when you do it.

We discovered this solution in Powerful, Persuasive Speaking, a two-day class presented by Alan Hoffler of Mills Wyck Communications. If being more persuasive would help you be more effective in your work or vocation, we cannot recommend this class enough.  In my session, one professional (NSA) and one pretty good amateur speaker both observed marked improvement in delivery skills.  People with no prior training in public speaking made amazing improvements.

I’m not, at this moment, a Tweeter.

I listen to and read about discussions of how it’s possible to use twitter to grow your online reputation; that it’s vital for companies to have the instant reputation management that Twitter facilitates, and that “Twitter is where the conversation is happening.”

OK. I am not sure what all of this means, or that I need to participate.

However, one sentence in one conference call floated out of the ether onto my notepad:

What most people don’t realize is that Twitter for off-line, non-personality-based businesses is an entirely different animal.

Naomi Dunford, in an Ittybiz Speakeasy call, late in December 2009.

I post this simply to have the statement in an accessible place to which I can send clients who are also baffled by Twitter.

Ever pondered the list of blog categories any particular author uses to aggregate his or her posts?  Ever tried to categorize your own?  Easy, the first time or two.  But before you have very many posts at all, you have almost as many categories and you can’t quite remember why you put any one post in any particular category in the first place.

In an attempt to maintain some control and consistency in this website’s categories, I thought about who had been “doing categorization” longer than blogs have been around–librarians.  I spend more time in the local public library system than I do in university libraries, so the Dewey Decimal System was a natural choice.  I copied off the categories from Wikipedia and started editing the list, removing the topics I am pretty sure I’ll never write about.

The list itself makes for interesting reading:

Now, I can see how “sex” and “the book” fall into nearby branches of a taxonomic tree, but I suspect a lot of people would be more likely to link “sex” and “the TV,” if they had to pick a communications medium.  Suddenly, a possible source of the idea for the movie Lars and the Real Girl takes shape.  (An aside:  see the movie if you’ve ever worked as, or near, computer programmers.  Also recommended is The IT Crowd, a comedy TV series from the BBC.)

Moving to the next set of shelves, we come to Philosophy.  While I might be seen to have a somewhat philosophical approach to some areas of my life, it’s not a topic I spent any time on in school.  The topic might well be served by deleting everything but the top level identifier.  (Missing numbers indicate the list has already been pruned.)

But darn it, there’s “graphology” (and is “divinatory” graphology different from and shelved elsewhere than forensic graphology?) near the bottom of the list, and “physiognomy,” and that’s where librarians put the “facial analysis” books (I think), and those are both interesting areas of non-scientific reading that feeds intuition. But will I actually write about them, enough to need their own category? Would readers understand the connection if I did write a post about handwriting analysis (met someone who does forensic graphoanalysis in Linkedin Answers the other day) and then categorized it under Philosophy?

Questions like this keep taxonomists up late at night.

Religion is easy. Don’t expect a lot of posts about the topic on this website and should any appear, they can all go into the same bucket.

Social Science, which is a topic I would have said I don’t cross paths with much (my clients tend to be natural scientists), contains law, education, economics, and communications. This is going to take some thought.

Language falls like religion. Not a lot of posts (given that “communications” is a subset of Social Science, not language), and any that do get written can go into one category. (Ditto Literature. Thinking about the difference between Language and Communication and Literature makes me wonder what it was like to sit in the committee meetings when the system was originally devised… Are the minutes of those meetings available, and where would they be shelved?)

Eventually, I’ll edit the list and then print a copy for the wall next to my PC, and if I’m really on top of my game, I’ll enter the categories I decide to keep into WordPress so I don’t have to think about this every time I write a post.

And then I’ll go back through what I’ve written so far and recategorize.

My corporate life was consumed by Six Sigma and process improvement.  While we rarely used the term “kaizen” (the tiny incremental changes that have been used to drive long-term improvement in factories), we nevertheless thought about the behavior constantly.  In my private practice, I support clients in the slightly more informal “Lean” office design, which is an apple that hasn’t fallen too far from the Six Sigma tree.

I was looking at my Sam’s Club receipt this morning and I noticed the sentence, “comment, continued on back…” I turned the receipt over to see: “items sold=2, the standard paragraph about doing a survey, the date and time stamp.” Although I have seen two-sided receipts before, generally they only contain standard boilerplate text that is printed before the paper is loaded into the cash register. This receipt had been printed on both sides, on the fly, as my purchases were rung. I thought about what it took to print receipts on both sides. It requires some changes in the cash register. It also required an investment in programmer’s time to write a routine that could determine how long the receipt was, then divide that length in half and print half of it on each side of the paper.

Receipts printed on two sides of paper use exactly half of the paper of standard receipts.  Sam’s Club must print an enormous lineal footage of receipt paper in the course of the business day. Halving the number of receipts they print is a guaranteed 50% reduction in the cost of receipt paper.

• A little bit of research shows that receipt rolls cost $.40 each in boxes of 24; presumably Sam’s Club can get them, in bulk, at a lower price.
• Additional research at my local grocery store indicated that a cashier can expect to change out a roll at least once a shift.
• A rough estimate of register hours per business day at my local Sam’s Club yields approximately 70 hours; at eight hours per shift that’s roughly 10 shifts minimum*.
• Wikipedia tells us that Sam’s Club had 713 locations in the United States in 2008.
• That’s about 2 1/2 million rolls of receipt paper a year (713 stores * 10 shifts / day * *1 roll/shift * 363 days / year)
• Allowing $.25 per roll and cutting the total in half comes to something like a $500,000 savings per year. That will buy a couple hours of programmer time**.
• In addition to the absolute cost of paper saved, Sam’s Club would be able to save the cost of the cashier time lost to changing rolls, the customer dissatisfaction engendered by roll changing delay, the amount of paper they need to keep on hand, the cost of shipping that much paper etc. etc. and so forth.

I do what I can to be green in my life. I write on both sides of the paper. I printed on recycled paper I get from someone else’s office. I save water in the shower and I have a low flush toilet. However, it would not have occurred to me to invest very much effort at all in trying to reduce the amount of paper that goes through a cash register receipt. While I am not accustomed to thinking of the Wal-Mart empire as a bastion of traditional kaizen, I have to step back and take this little observation as inspirational. There are many tiny incremental improvements I could be making in my own life and work, things that require a small investment to get right in the first place and then reap the benefits thereafter. I will be looking harder for them.

*Estimate derived by counting the number of registers open at the various times of day I shop.  It’s probably much higher because I will avoid the store if the parking lot is crowded, and one presumes that more registers are open when the parking lot is full.

**May we also assume the company that supplied the cash registers picked up most of the cost of making the programming change?

I went to hear Robert Langer from MIT speak at the Carolina Innovations Seminar tonight.  His bio spells out the awards and papers and degrees.  I followed a lot of the science, and most of the discussion that follow at the free-beer-and-pizza mixer after the speech.  It’s been a while since I was in the lab.  The science, while important and interesting, wasn’t really what caught my attention.

Dr. Langer mentioned 20 or 25 former post-docs and graduate students, and to a person, they were introduced as the “Endowed Chair of the XYZ Department of this major school” or “Dean of the School of Medicine at that prominent university” or CEO or CTO of a biotech company recently sold for $12B or …  I lost track.  If I’d known I was going to be writing about what he said, I would have taken better notes.

At the mixer afterward, a young man who had also noticed how Dr. Langer mentioned his former students wondered how all those smart people came to be in the same place.  I think it’s the other way around.  Those grad students and post-docs were successful because they were in that place, working with and being encouraged by a real leader, as opposed to someone who was merely the “director of the lab.”  Jack Welch had a similar effect on people who worked for him–more Fortune 500 CEOs came out of GE during his time at the company than from any other company ever.  Similarly, I recall reading that everyone at the top of GE had, at one time in their careers, worked for one man who sent each of them on to bigger jobs.

Is it that all the smart business people went to GE, and all the smart biotechies went to MIT?  To a certain extent, yes.  But I have also seen the opposite behavior.  I worked for a boss who, to the best of my recollection, never promoted anyone above himself.  I could have missed someone, of course; again, if I had known I would be writing about it these many years later, I would have kept better notes.

Dr. Langer mentioned that all the students whose grant applications were rejected in the course of tissue engineering progress had gone on to positions of significant influence in the field, while the people who rejected the applications were still reviewing, and rejecting, grants.  Funny how that turns out.  Most of us who didn’t get promoted have since left the company and gone on to interesting new opportunities.  I wonder how the manager explains that to himself?

I started a new notebook this morning. It’s the latest of more than 50 (at last count*). This one is thoughts about business of Red Tuxedo, <> morning pages. It’s a 10×7, wire bound, 100% recycled paper sketchbook. I bought it last Friday evening at the bookstore specifically for this purpose — knowing I needed somewhere to write about business <> blog posts <> journal or diary or morning pages <> daily planner <> client meeting notebook. And now it starts. I’ve numbered the pages, to 31 so far, numbering only the odd numbers. I left two pages for a table of contents.

Active Notebook Inventory

• 8.5 by 11 blank hardbound journals. Mostly, I use these for art. Textiles has three volumes, jewelry has two, color has two.
• composition books with the black-and-white cover. I can count 14 on the shelf from where I sit. Mostly, they are full of written notes that don’t warrant a larger volume, often notes about websites I’m developing, or events that happen repeatedly but not very often, like my annual Penguin party or what I gave people for Christmas this year (and every year since I started the book in 1994.
• Page per day record books–the green ones, they don’t have a year: I keep one for the garden and one for big events in my life so I can remember when it was that happened.
• page per day record book, dated: I found a 1985 edition of the page a day record book, the oversized kind that costs $59.99 at Kmart today at the thrift shop in 2009. They wanted $1.50 for it. It had not been used very much at all, and I glued some blank paper over the entries I didn’t need to see. I think I have a smaller version of this book in stash from a different year.
• Small blank books that I received as gifts. Some of these have lines. I them for health records, one for me and one for my animals, in separate volumes. I keep these records by month. It’s good to know when the newest dog was neutered,  when the cat disappeared, or when did I receive the rabies series?
• 5.5 x 8″ blank books, with a glued spine. I used to keep my reading list in one of these notebooks, but this year I started keeping a list in MS Excel.
• 11 x 14″ blank sketchbooks. I keep ideas for the bigger art in here, but carving and my furniture. I have four of them within reach.
• An engineering notebook, with graph paper. I use this to sketch layout plans for furniture and construction projects, such as the installation of the rain barrel system at my house.
• A record book with lined, eye–ease green pages that are numbered. I use this as my daily planner. I started this system in 2004.
• Plastic portfolio books: a 8.5 x 11 for my formal art portfolio. I carry a 5 x 7 version in my purse all the time. I keep two 11 x 14 books, one for press clippings about my art and one for organizing magazine articles about different ways of managing ideas.
• Engineering field record book with waterproof paper. I found four of these at the swap shed several years ago, and I keep one in my street fair backpack to record hoop sales.

Notebook Qualities That Matter

Notebook size. Binding. Flatness when open. Paper quality, feel, and tooth. Paper color. How the different pens that I use move across a particular paper. Whether the paper is lined (not as much fun), graph, or blank. Blank paper is the best but it’s hard to find.

Editorial

I sometimes have to smile when I see bold or extravagant or creative covers on the blank books section at the bookstore only to open the journal and find it full of neatly ruled paper. I can only assume the vendors have tested the sales of the product, and that lined paper sells much better. It is unfortunate, in my opinion, to be encouraging creativity by telling people to stay within the lines. Daytimer, the planner people, once offered blank calendars — each page had the day and date printed in the upper corner and the rest of the page was blank. I had planned to buy the set the year after I saw it in the catalog, but it was gone by the time I was ready to order. I suspect that Daytimer recognized that creative types wanted more freedom in their planner, but at the same time, creative types are perfectly capable of inventing their own planners.

Yesterday I purchased a brand-new 2006 planner for $.25 at the Habitat Re-store. I think my life would be smoother if I did a better job of planning out the shape of my week, and where I intend to get various tasks and projects done. I’m hoping to use the shape of the week inside this new book for that purpose. To that end, it doesn’t matter about the number on the day or the year; all I need is the shape.

I suppose I could get much the same benefits by printing out the week view onto a blank or recycled sheet of paper. However, you can’t ignore your own history. I like the feeling of a notebook as it fills up. I like the way the paper changes over time, with writing. I like the way the notebook gets thicker. I like the way I can flip through the filled pages and see what I’ve done, or not done; I simply like a notebook than a collection of sheets of paper. For a quarter, what do I have to lose?

Incidentally, a friend of mine once lost her ability to pursue intellectual property theft because she tore her notes out of a pad of paper before she went to her lawyer to discuss the case. Ever since then, I’ve been particularly careful to keep important notes about my business in a bound book with numbered pages. I could probably make the case that it’s the value of my own intellectual property that drives me to keep notebooks, but the fact is that I have kept them since I could write.  I have them all and I pay a mortgage on a house big enough to store them and as my BF says, “that’s how I roll.”

*I know this because I really did count them all, once. I read some creativity teacher encouraging students to get a special journal for a particular body of work, saying it was OK to have more than one. “More than one?!?,” I thought. “I must have 10!” and then I counted, and stopped at 51, in active use within reach of my desk, not counting the new or recycled notebooks in inventory, waiting for a brain storm, and that was several years ago.

Henry Ford: surround yourself with smarter people.
Any sport: play against better players to get better.
The Framingham heart study: you’re as fat as your friends (and you smoke as much as they do, too).

Everybody says it, but not everybody does it. Parents worry about the effects of their children’s friends on their children, but do they worry about the effect of their own friends on their life anywhere near as much? It’s just as important.

When people are initially laid off from long-term jobs, they find comfort and support in attending job clubs and classes. However some find that, should they stay unemployed for a longer time than expected, they may be better to move into groups where people are creating new work and new jobs for themselves.

Change which you can. You may not be able to stop smoking, or start exercising, just yet. You may not be able to not eat junk food. But maybe it’s possible to adjust the amount of time you spend with people who practice the behavior and enjoy the success you want. It can rub off.

I came home from teaching a course about the tools that office workers need to be productive to an open calendar and three or four blog posts waiting to get out of my head onto the screen. As I settled in to work, I noticed that my big dog was barking his “something needs my attention” bark; a bark that didn’t stop and didn’t shift as it would if he were following someone moving on the street. I went out to see what had his attention.

One of my neighbor’s goats had died.

Farm, or even backyard-farm, life is often not pretty. One thing I know for sure is that once there’s a problem, it won’t get any better on its own.

I called her owner. We talked about what to do with the body, and fortunately, thought of the tigers. The Carolina Tiger Rescue facility was happy to take her, but they couldn’t come and pick her up, so I loaded her into the bed of my truck and delivered her. By the time I came home, the afternoon was gone and the evening’s schedule called.

It is in the nature of goats to disrupt schedules and plans, but it is also in the nature of schedules and plans to be disrupted. Your life may never cross paths with a real live goat, or even a dead one. Count yourself lucky. But every life has its own goat-equivalent. And most of the time, schedules are disrupted with the addition of “something else, more, additional.” We don’t even think of it as “disruptive” when we discover a chunk of the plan doesn’t have to be completed, although it’s as much of a change as finding out we have a new responsibility.

There’s always a goat.

Once more, I carefully set one of my devices to charge overnight, only to find it dead as a doornail in the morning. Why? because the mini-USB connector fits both ways, AND, because the logo for the “wall” end of the charger is on THE BOTTOM of the connector.

Why would anyone do this? Once day, I’ll ask the nice people at Blue Ant. For today, I’ll get out my gold paint pen and mark the top side of the connector.

For the record, all of my other connectors are marked this way. I saw the logo on the blue tooth charger and (silly me!) thought that the logo alone would serve to mark the top. Ha! I will never remember that in this case alone, the logo marks the bottom.

Younger readers with good eyesight may well be able to distinguish the tree-like symbol that means “top” on a USB connection, from the “arrow” on the bottom, in all kinds of light. People who buy reading glasses by the dozen will understand why it might help to mark the top. White paint would work as well as gold, I suppose, but gold marks feel a bit more luxurious, for the same price. You can buy the pens at art supply stores.