Knowledge management: Are you too busy to think?: September 27, 2004: New Thinking by Gerry McGovern

I always wondered why people put in so many hours sitting behind a desk. You would hear some people say "well you have to work 60 hours a week to show your dedication."

Bullshit.

I could get a monkey to wear a nice tie and work 70 hours a week and still have nothing to show for it. Its the quality of work not the quantity of hours that matters. Show me someone who can produce results and I will go with that person over the guy who is staring at his laptop at 8pm wondering how to complete his projections.

Quality over quantity.

If it took someone all weekend to finish something the first thing I ask is "why?" If there was a tight deadline then would't it have been more efficient to work smarter before that deadline so it wasn't so tight in the first place? Did that person or team stay all weekend to complete work they could have done in the 40 hour work week but didn't? Why did that not happen? Get to the root of the problem, and work more efficiently to solve it.

There are always going to be exceptions to this rule but it doesn't have to happen as often as it does. Work smarter in the time you are supposed to and then you will see better results.

Aks Jeeves

Finally a search engine that tells you what it feels. The complicated algo here must have been years in the making.

Try a few queries and see how you can never go back to Google again.

Straight Talk About Blogs: Do You Really Need One?

Having been attempting this blog for a while the question of do you really need a blog is very relevant to me. On the one hand its a great method of self expression, to put your thoughts(sometimes raw) on record. On the other hand it feels like shouting in the middle of the empty desert. Is anyone hearing me?

My reaction to that question would be, if you have to ask...Of course not enough people are.

Writing is tougher than it looks. Sometimes you think you have all these things to say about a subject then you start actually writing and there is this one sentence just sitting there. Such a lonely sentence it is.

That last paragraph made no sense since it just appeared there with seemingly no transition. That's a good example of breaking the writing flow. I bet I lost some readers with that mistake.

I am going to bold this sentence to make it look like a very important point.

I already know I will look back at this blog a few years from now and laugh my ass off at it...

More on Media Addiction - Or Is It Just American Productivity?

I've always found it so completely sad to watch co-workers in the interactive industry staying at their office at all hours to work. Guess what people, you are not saving anyone's life with your work. It's this country's sad addiction to work that makes our overall lives miserable.

Really what are you doing right now that is so darn important that it can't wait until tomorrow?

Go home, see your children, wife, husband, friends, relatives etc. No one ever said on their deathbed, I should have worked more...

The summer is winding down allthough it hardly felt like "summer" up here in western ny at all with all the rain. So I can't say that I am in a great mood right now since the weather sucked all the life out of summer and now we face the western ny winter in all its glory.

I am also dreading the 4th quarter rush in search engine CPC advertising. This is the time when all the businesses are jumping into the game and raising prices on all the B2C words out there. I know its all fair game but I also know that almost none of them are really tracking their ROI by word, they are just ego bidding and thats not helpful at all. So the people doing it the right way are playing agsinst all these hot button bidders along with all the other pressures of producing for the 4th quarter.

What Can Search Tell Us About the Future of Marketing?

Amen brother! This piece does a great job of explaining exactly how the search advertising model is changing the way advertising will be bought and sold.

Here is the shock for the old school ad people: You now have to be accountable for the ad dollars that are spent! You can't justify an ad buy just by saying how many people may or may not have seen an ad at a given time.

The time has come to justify marketing dollars and search is only the beginning.