In the car on the way back from our holiday in Filey, Steph said to me that her friends were always surprised that I was on Facebook and Twitter long before she was. I was working in cafe’s, using a tablet PC and enjoying the benefits of social networks before...
This post is the fifth and last in a series about my working life Energy comes in many forms, physical energy, mental energy and perhaps most importantly the elusive proxy for energy, willpower. The relationship between these forms of energy is hard to define, its clear to me though that...
This post is the third in a series about my working life I minimise the hours I work because that allows me to maximise the time I spend moving around, and done right it reduces stress and provides me with enough motivation to invest in maintaining a healthy diet, stretching,...
This post is the fourth in a series about my working life I’ve worked with people to improve their productivity for over 20 years and some of that has hopefully rubbed off on my own working practice. There’s no universal productivity practice though, what’s best for one person will be...
This post is the second in a series about my working life The phrase ‘Outside In’ is all the rage in my company at the moment, but it’s been my approach for many years. About 10 years ago I realised that there are thousands of people at work who know...
This post is the first in a series about my working life I used to be ambitious but soon after I became ill I realised that personal ambition was incompatible with the advice I was receiving from my doctors and more importantly from the International Still’s Disease Foundation which provides...
Each day this week while on Holiday with Steph in Filey I’m planning to write a post covering a different element of my working life. I’ve carefully designed this life so as to maximise my impact and productivity with the lowest levels of stress and minimal working hours. Whilst some...
As Christmas approached last year I decided that I didn’t need anything. More than that I decided that I had too much, and didn’t need to buy anything for a long time. Even after coming to this conclusion though it would be easy to drift back into old habits, I’ve...
A long time ago now I read the Mythical Man Month, and I remember two things from it: On a large activity conceptual integrity is really difficult to achieve and maintain In the sixties IBM seemed to do a better job at managing large development programmes than we do now...
Friday is my ‘rest and relax’ day, a day when I work on my own, review what I’ve learned this week, collect my thoughts, plan for the future. As I walked along the beach to Lytham I started to ponder teams. We can sometimes get carried away by the idea...