Entries Tagged as 'Main'

December 10, 2007

Crankable widgets

The concept of transforming my tasks into “crankable widgets” helps me Get Things Done.
Imagine what it’s like to work in a factory: You are responsible for your part of the assembly line. The work may not be easy, but you know how to do it. You do it over and over. You are cranking out [...]

December 7, 2007

Saying No

I received a phone call that impressed me. It was like this:
“Richard, I’m afraid I can’t help with the project like we had planned. Some things have come up, and I no longer have the time. I just wanted to let you know. If I can help in the future, I’ll call you again.”
Flakiness is [...]

December 5, 2007

Harmful to Minors

Even the libertarian and most ardent proponent of free speech should care that we continue to allow pornography to run rampant on the Internet. Here’s why.
A proposal by Larry Lessig called H2M (”Harmful to Minors”) would help parents protect children from pornography. Professor Lessig argues that if government doesn’t help parents block unwanted pornography, the [...]

December 4, 2007

Presentation matters to motivation

I’ve recently been pondering how to motivate workers. I’m mostly interested in how to motivate volunteers in a nonprofit organization — a “cause”. Just a day after writing about it, I found a section in Made to Stick with good insight:
We may mistakenly think that people are motivated by the pursuit of baser needs, while [...]

November 30, 2007

How to motivate workers

Not everyone agrees on how to motivate workers. I’m still trying to decide which of these ideas sounds most correct:

Charles Coonradt, author of The Game of Work, gives five reasons why games are better than jobs:
1. Feedback is much more frequent in games, 2. there’s always a score to “reinforce the behavior you want repeated,” [...]