August 29, 2007 – 5:30 pm
I checked out The Minimalist Cooks Dinner by Mark Bittman from the library yesterday so I can review it on The Everyday Cafe. I love good cooking and I love quick dinners, but rarely do they come together at one time in our house. A quick dinner might be tacos or spaghetti with marinara or […]
August 27, 2007 – 4:56 pm
Steve Rubel suggests that the web is making friendship “more about quantity and less about quality.” I see something quite different. I have more friends because of the web, but at the same time, my relationships whether friendship or acquaintanceship are stronger.
Maybe the web makes it possible for us to have more friends without decreasing […]
August 22, 2007 – 4:30 pm
What is the critical ingredient in the performance of virtual teams? It’s not communication; it’s trust. Trust mediates the relationship between communication and performance. In the absence of trust, more communication will not help your virtual team function better. Here’s a PowerPoint describing some of the relevant research.
Why is trust so important to the functioning […]
August 19, 2007 – 4:40 pm
You’ve probably experienced flow: that sense of effortless engagement in what you’re doing. Maybe you get it when you’re coding or designing or writing or painting. Time and self disappears, channeled into the world making itself real.
Flow guru Csikszentmihalyi suggests you are likely to get into flow when:
You are engaged actively with the world. Surfing […]
August 15, 2007 – 5:06 pm
My most marked-up book of recent has been Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan Watts. Among the many insights I found:
Some communities can be too clustered, leading to stagnation, where no new ideas can percolate. That happens when every person is so connected that whatever they hear about matters very little […]
August 15, 2007 – 8:15 am
Today I’m thinking about this excerpt from Frances Mayes’ Bella Tuscany:
I feel as well a growing distrust of spending too much of one’s life deifying work. Finding that running balance among ambition, solitude, stimulation, adventure — how to do this? …
The last few years have pulled me too much in the exterior direction. After devoting […]
August 13, 2007 – 6:22 pm
It’s almost September: school supplies, fall clothes, old friends, class schedules. I love the motion after summer’s pause. I love the thrill of new projects and the renewed energy for old ones. I love the return to making work seriously fun instead of taking vacations that are seriously fun.
In celebration, I bought a notebook today. […]
Everyone suffers from burnout at some time or another. You know what it feels like: everything irritates you; everyone bothers you; every task requires too much energy. You can’t imagine ever feeling motivated by your work again. What do you do? Here are a few ideas… though they didn’t totally work for me. I greeted […]
I’m really excited to see what Oracle’s experimenting with in bringing social software into the enterprise. I see them starting to answer the question of how you do ad hoc problem-solving across informal social networks when there’s a formal hierarchy involved. This, to me, is a key issue in the Web 2.0 version of enterprise […]
Don’t be surprised that some multimillionaires in Silicon Valley don’t feel rich. That’s exactly what a bunch of psychological and behavioral economics research predicts. We care more about relative wealth than absolute.
The research says this: while absolute income matters, relative income matters more, once you’ve reached a certain standard of living. That’s because human beings […]
