Today is World Productivity Day – a time to think about how to get the best out of your work day. After a few years and thousands of posts for Lifehacker Australia as well many other publications there are a bunch of things I’ve learned that work for me.
Some months ago, audio company Sonos made a very unpopular announcement. The company declared that it would be changing support for a number of older products. This caused great consternation as the company had said, many times on the public record, that because of the way the products were made, new features could be retrofitted to older equipment. This is because almost every component within a Sonos speaker is under software control.
After a huge amount of backlash from its customer community, Sonos backtracked and drew a line in the sand, declaring older products, made before May 2020, part of an ‘S1’ environment and anything newer is part of ‘S2’.
Social distancing. It’s a horrible term that conjures up feelings of isolation and loneliness. I much prefer the term ‘physical distancing’ which is about our physical proximity but not a separation of spirit or fellowship.
It’s easy during this time of pandemic to see what we’ve lost. Children miss playing with their friends at school. Adults miss the water-cooler banter at work. We miss seeing different faces up close. We miss the hugs and kisses of family members. Birthday parties. The gym. Going to the movies. Restaurants. Weddings. Even funerals. The list of what we have lost over the last few months is long.
Despite our constant denials, Kathryn and I were middle-aged when we started Media-Wize. But, it turns out, the research says founders with life experience are more likely to be successful than millennials.
Through my work at Media-Wize I talk with and work with a huge number of entrepreneurs. Some have seen success while others struggle to get traction. What’s the difference?
Experience.
The COVD-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc across the globe. For many countries, there is not a single activity that we took for granted that hasn’t been changed – perhaps permanently. But one of the features of western society is the political obsession with ‘the economy’. The problem is, politicians have trained us to be so focussed on the health of the economy that we’re missing its true purpose. It’s not society’s role to support the economy. The economy needs to serve society. And the pandemic is a once in a generation opportunity to correct that imbalance.
Like many people, I suffer from email overload. Some days, even after spending some time unsubscribing from email lists and marketing messages, I still get in excess of 150 messages per day. As a journalist, a great many of these are press releases and story pitches. The volume is so great I simply can’t write all the stories – even if there great ideas and leads. But how can I respectfully respond to all these? Should I even try?
Like many people, I suffer from email overload. Some days, even after spending some time unsubscribing from email lists and marketing messages, I still get in excess of 150 messages per day. As a journalist, a great many of these are press releases and story pitches. The volume is so great I simply can’t write all the stories – even if there great ideas and leads. But how can I respectfully respond to all these? Should I even try?
Like many people, I suffer from email overload. Some days, even after spending some time unsubscribing from email lists and marketing messages, I still get in excess of 150 messages per day. As a journalist, a great many of these are press releases and story pitches. The volume is so great I simply can’t write all the stories – even if there great ideas and leads. But how can I respectfully respond to all these? Should I even try?
The headline screams “Huge cost of Aussies working from home”. The opening paragraph tells us “Australians will be urged to get back to work at the office”. The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped society so quickly that many of us are still adjusting. And while there’s been a huge focus on the health issues (and rightly so) and now a shift towards economic recovery, it seems to be forgotten that the last couple of months have been extremely jarring. Just as we are getting used to life in isolation, we’re being asked to change again.
Over the last three or four years, home automation has become a really big deal. Much of the coverage you read talks abut the “smart home” – a house where various appliances such as lighting, window coverings and heating and cooling are controlled using a variety of sensors and apps. But the reality of creating a smart home is far harder than many people realise. Not all devices will interoperate because there’s turf war in progress. Amazon, Apple and Google have all established their own standards for managing the integration of different components. But there may be a way to get the different warring factions to play together. It’s called Homebridge.
Over the years, many security experts, and more than a few non-experts, have said that a VPN is an essential piece of security software for travellers and the users of remotely-accessed business systems. When I entered the corporate world in the 1990s, remotely accessing office systems without a VPN was considered a massive risk. But is that still the case? What are the cases for and against using a VPN and is there still a place for them?
