Group items tagged

Even the illusion of progress causes an accelerating effect.

Take time to reflect on and acknowledge how your work has progressed. All it takes is a pause to get the satisfying sight of all your own kind of accumulating Bionicles rather than letting them slip past you, unrecognized sources of fuel.

Your motivation surges the closer you are to reaching your goal. Something about seeing the finish line lights a fire, even when you’re not always on the right track.

organizational psychologists. Work, they say, is "elastic," meaning that it stretches and shrinks to fit the time allotted.

Parkinson's Law: work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.

Rando only launched in March but the anti-social photo-sharing app that deliberately eschews the standard social network clutter of likes and comments and connections – simply letting users share random photos with random strangers and get random snaps in return — has blasted past five million photo shares after a little over two months in the wild. It is now averaging around 200,000 shares per day, says its creator ustwo.

For half that time Rando was iOS only, with its Android app not launching til April. Platform spread aside, the huge point here is that Rando has ditched all the self-congratulatory, endorphin-boosting hooks that apparently keep people tethered to their social networks. Yet managed to grow regardless. As Rando’s tagline pithily put it: ‘You have no friends’. The photos you share here will never be liked, never be favourited, and if they are shared outside Rando to other social networks, a feature Rando most definitely does not enable within its app, you likely won’t ever know anything about it. It’s a very rare digital social blackhole — but one that’s proving surprisingly popular (and all without any embedded social shares to grow virally), even while it’s refreshingly ego-free

factor in the rumblings about teens’ declining interest in traditional social networks and Rando could be something of a canary in the social networking coalmine, picking up subtle traces of Facebook fatigue, and identifying a growing appetite among mobile owners at least to take back some control and reintroduce a little private space by slamming shut those social doors. The rise of mobile messaging apps is another key trend to factor in here, apps which put private communication first, and social comms as a secondary add on. Certain age groups’ attention is arguably increasingly shifting to these more contained communications mediums — channels which offer both private and public comms within the one app, as Facebook does, but which aren’t centrally focused on publicly broadcast personal content. Rather they put the intimacy of one-to-one messaging at their core. Some, like China’s WeChat, even include serendipitous discovery features that are similar to Rando — like its Drift Bottle stranger messaging feature. 

anticipatory systems. 

Increasingly, rather than waiting for us to tell them what we want, in the form of a search query or command, they'll prompt us with suggestions.

Here's a simple definition of anticipatory systems. Think of them as artificially intelligent services that are aware of external context — including ambient inputs like time of day, social connections, upcoming meetings, local weather, traffic and more.

Leaders at some companies have begun to include employees — not just senior executives, corporate spokespeople, and other authorized communicators — in the work of telling their company story. "Employee-generated content" is one term for this practice. Our term for it is inclusion, and it's one element of a new leadership model that we call organizational conversation.

That's a big departure from how leaders have traditionally managed the flow of ideas and information within their company. And, not surprisingly, there is a reluctance within many organizations to move in that direction. Recently, when we surveyed participants in an Executive Education program at Harvard Business School, more than half of them (51%) said that the goal of "encouraging employee voice" had "no priority" or had a "low priority" at their company.

People today are skeptical of slickly produced brand messages. They're skeptical of slick official spokespeople, too. Leaders who want to build public trust in their company brand, therefore, often recruit employees to serve as brand ambassadors. Training people who work for a company to speak for that company is a marketing practice that doubles as an engagement-building practice.

although the experience of insight is sudden and can seem disconnected from the immediately preceding thought, these studies show that insight is the culmination of a series of brain states and processes operating at different time scales."

This echoes the favored Fast Company definition of creativity, that it's finding the connections between seemingly unrelated things.

Posting pictures to Facebook only works well if the pictures are self-explanatory.

Use digits rather than words. “10 ways to…” works better than “Ten ways to….” This is often a common blogging mistake that can easily be avoided.

Being specific, while also showing that the article will be in depth, is one of the most important things to focus on.