Tag Archives: life lessons

April 22, 2015 · 11:25 am

More Attention, Fewer Things

I’ve been away – did you miss me? My absence was, as I posted the other day, the annual golf trip during which I assess my tolerance for pain and suffering both on the golf course and off. I try very hard not to check email nor to dip my toe into the river of digital content from which I drink daily. Fortunately, I have a bunch of distractions provided by my buddies.  

Today I fully plugged in, having returned to work. Zipping through email was relatively easy – I had already answered the critical ones during the trip and now it was just a matter of newsletters and such. My RSS stream is another matter entirely. There are thousands of articles here and there is no way I can skim them all much less read them. In the process of doing so, however, I thought of something that might be useful to you all as well.

Not everything is critical.  Not everything is important.  Most of it can be ignored safely.  I’ve found that the really important information out there shows up in multiple places and it’s pretty easy to tell that you might want to  check something out when you see it on a second or third stream.    The word itself – “stream” is important.  We’re land animals – we don’t live in a stream.  Lots of experts are beginning to tell us only to check email a few times a day – times when we can afford to task switch and be fully present.

I like this from Oliver Burkeman:

The bigger point here isn’t really about email in particular; it’s about the ever greater “boundarylessness” of work. When anyone can be contacted at any time of day, in any location; when the costs in time and effort of sending a message to a colleague, client or underling dwindle to nothing; when we’re confronted by an effectively infinite amount of information we could consume, or tasks we could perform, if only time were infinite too …

I just deleted a thousand articles in a couple of my stream topics without even looking.  It was the equivalent of recycling unread, old magazines I know I’ll never read nor care if I miss.  All of us need to give more attention to fewer things and stop making ourselves crazy with nits.  Who’s with me?

 

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April 13, 2015 · 9:42 am

Do More

This was not at all how I planned to start this week of blogging but sometimes reality rears its ugly head and our plans need to change.

Over the weekend I learned that a friend passed away.  He was relatively young – in his early forties – and while I’m at an age where death pays a visit in my world a lot more often than it used to, this one has shaken me up.  You see, this is a guy whose life was seemingly very much on track up until about 2 years ago.  He had some physical challenges – very bad arthritis – which made his job in golf difficult.  Things started downhill.  He tried to start a business but it never quite got off the ground.  His marriage broke up.  His social media activity became less frequent as did his general communication.  I even heard he was homeless at one point.  While none of the obituaries mention a cause of death, it may have been as simple as a broken heart, deep depression, or as complex as a suicide.  I don’t know that it matters.

I wrote something on this topic a year and a half ago:

We all know a person who displays symptoms of things not being right in their lives. Those symptoms could come in the form of substance abuse or a big weight gain. Maybe their personality has changed – gone from light to dark. If you care about that person, you probably think about a way to say something that asks about what’s going on. It’s hard – people have feelings, after all and they are probably just as aware as you are of what they’re doing. Probably more so.  The ensuing discussion can be hard for both of you.  Sometimes it can derail a friendship.  More often, it begins a healing process, but only if you care enough to say something.

I tried to follow that advice with this friend.  I tried to help with the business start-up, doing the digital work and marketing.  I invited him to come cook with me (he had professional training and loved a kitchen).  Other invitations to meet up went unanswered.  In short, I tried.  And yet I feel as if I could have done more. I didn’t really “say something.”

It’s easy to say that his family should have been helping – he has a lot of family in the area.  Who knows – maybe they were estranged.  Maybe he wasn’t keeping them informed.  How many of us tell our loved ones all is well when the reality is that our world has fallen apart?

I’m sorry to start the week on a down note but PLEASE.  If you have people in your lives who seem to be lost, helping them find their way is really about helping you too.  Be that selfish.  Do more. Don’t wait and don’t be afraid.  They might be gone before you overcome your fears.

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April 7, 2015 · 10:58 am

You Could But You Shouldn’t

You might have missed an item last week although you might very well have been the subject of the report.  Do you know about ad injectors?  I’ve written about them before, most recently when some genius at Lenovo thought purchasers of their laptops would want to have Superfish bundled with their machines.  Besides being a massive security risk it was annoying as hell, as a plethora of ads cluttered up users’ screens.  Well, it turns out that Lenovo doesn’t have a patent on either stupidity (at best) or maliciousness (more likely).  To wit:

More than 5% of Google site visitors have at least one ad injector installed. Of those, half have at least two injectors installed, and nearly one-third have at least four installed, per a study Google conducted with researchers at University of California Berkeley.

In other words, millions of people have code installed that will insert new ads, or replace existing ones, into the pages those people read.  You may be one of them.  How did this happen?  Generally, some miscreant bundled the ad injector with some other desirable piece of software which the user installed.  Tool bars (don’t install them!) and certain software download sites (download.com, for one) do this routinely.  As the Google Security Blog put it:

Unwanted ad injectors aren’t part of a healthy ads ecosystem. They’re part of an environment where bad practices hurt users, advertisers, and publishers alike. People don’t like ad injectors for several reasons: not only are they intrusive, but people are often tricked into installing ad injectors in the first place, via deceptive advertising, or software “bundles.”…Ad injectors are problematic for advertisers and publishers as well. Advertisers often don’t know their ads are being injected, which means they don’t have any idea where their ads are running. Publishers, meanwhile, aren’t being compensated for these ads, and more importantly, they unknowingly may be putting their visitors in harm’s way, via spam or malware in the injected ads.
So why does this happen?  Because it can and because some executive doesn’t have the moral courage to say “no” to an easy buck.  Any of us in business make choices like this all the time.  We could do things that are evil but profitable but most of us choose not to.  We should not be afraid to point out and shun those who do.
Business is hard.  Making the right decisions is part of what makes it so.  We don’t do some things just because we can.  Besides being immoral it’s myopic and as Lenovo found out the backlash can be worse than the original problem.  Make sense?

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