Steve's Seaside Life

Daily Archive: August 18, 2004

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Blackberry and Personal Productivity.

I have recently given up my Blackberry for economic reasons, and spent the money I saved on an IPAQ which I convinced myself would be more, “life enhancing”,  after a month I think I made the right decision but I do miss my Blackberry a lot and still feel it would add a lot of value to my work/home life if I still had it.  A recent report brings the issue into clear focus:

Research In Motion has today published the results of a survey it commissioned with Ipsos Reid into the benefits of using BlackBerry handhelds. Among the report’s conclusions is the compelling statistic that employers recuperate on average 188 working hours a year, or more than a working month(*1) for every member of staff they provide with a BlackBerry handheld. Employees also benefit from the improved productivity enabled by BlackBerry, salvaging on average more than 108 hours a year in personal time. This is the equivalent to more than thirteen days extra holiday a year (*2).

A 2004 DTI survey highlighted that 87% of employees would like more time to spend with friends and family and that nearly four in ten adults (38%) between the ages of 35 …

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Perfection – or good enough.

Every month or so someone tells me my work is too detailed, or that I am a perfectionist.  Ironically every week or so someone also tells me that I have not covered some topic or other in sufficient detail.  However the, “its too detailed”, or “too complex”, audience tends to be the one that pays the bills so they are more important to listen to.  I came across this nice little post on the subject, and I have extracted a snip from it here:

One important lesson I’ve learned about designing software is that sometimes it pays to smother one’s perfectionist engineer instincts and be less ambitious about the problems one is trying to solve. Put more succintly, a technology doesn’t have to solve every problem just enough problems to be useful. Two examples come to mind which hammered this home to me; Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web and collaborative filtering which sites like Amazon use.

However I am not a person who likes to compromise so I am gradually working towards a way of solving this problem, and its pretty simple and obvious.  Stop writing documents and start writing web sites.  This post is an example, (although not a …