Ten great quotes from Rework

Here are ten great quotes, in no particular order,  from one of my favorite books Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. I recommend it to anyone who works with anything.

I was aiming for a Top ten quotes but it was simply too hard to determine, so I settled for ten great ones.

• “When you make tiny decisions, you can’t make big mistakes.”
• “You ‘re not going to out-Apple Apple.”
• “Big companies are obsessed with secrecy.”
• “Meet at the site of the problem instead of a conference room.”
• “Don’t be afraid to show your flaws. Imperfections are real and people respond to real.”
• “No wonder so much business writing winds up dry, wordy and dripping with nonsense. People are just continuing the bad habits they picked up in school.”
• “There’s a ton of untapped potential trapped under lame policies, poor direction and stifling bureaucracies. Cut the crap and you’ll find that people are waiting to do great work. They just need to be given the chance.”
• “When everything needs approval, you create a culture of nonthinkers. You create a boss-vs-worker relationship that screams ‘I don’t trust you.’”
• “Don’t create a policy because on person did something wrong once. Policies are only meant for situations that come up over and over again.”
• “Don’t talk about “monetization” and being “transparent”; talk about making money and being honest. Don’t use seven words when four will do.”

Order Rework wherever you usually buy books, they’ll probably have it.

Work faster by typing faster

Most of us spend a good deal of time by the keyboard, so your typing speed very much affects your working speed.

Most of us underestimate the impact this has on our productivity, so I made an rough calculation of how much time you could save by increasing your typing speed. It’s based on 45 full 5-day workweeks per year and and hour of pure typing per day.

There’s plenty of software to help you learn to type faster. I use aTypeTrainer4Mac myself, and I would definitely recommend it to all Mac users. A great app which amazingly is freeware.

Keep your coffee hot on the power adapter

The laptop’s power adapter gets pretty hot, which makes it excellent to keep my coffee from getting cold.

Ah, the joy of using energy that would otherwise have gone to waste.

Ultra simple tagging of text documents

Using tags in for documents is a great way to make them searchable in unorganized piles of documents.

The problem is that different applications store the tags in different metadata formats. The tags in a Word document emailed to you won’t necessarily show up when you search your email.

The solution is ridiculously simple: write the tags in your documents.

Since almost all decent search features support searching inside documents, it will find the words.

Regardless on which platform and in which application the document was created (provided it’s on of the standard text document types) it will searchable in any environment.

When I have a miscellaneous note of some kind, with no obvious place or category, and I’m not sure I’ll find it where I put it – I just add some extra tag words at the end of the document. For clarification and consistency i preface the words with “tags: ”

As with all tags I include related words not in the text already as well as alternate spelling of names.

The documents are in a folder named Notes full of miscellaneous crud.

Save your text documents as RTF whenever you can

We all run in to problems with certain computers not being able to read the attached Microsoft Word document. Word 98 can’t open Word 2003 documents, Word 2003 can’t open 2007 documents. Word 2010 can’t open Word 5.1 documents and so on.

So what is a good format that all word processors can read?

Rich Text Format – RTF (Developed by Microsoft, ironically).

From Wikipedia:

The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated RTF) is a document file format developed by Microsoft in 1987 for cross-platform document interchange. Most word processors are able to read and write RTF documents.

RTF doesn’t support all features of word processors the most commonly used being tables, images, headers and footers. But more often than you think, you aren’t using any of those features, anyway.

I’ve been in the  habit of  saving text as RTF 1994, and not once has anyone failed to open the documents. RTF documents created with Word 5.1 for the Mac from 1993 can be opened today with any word processor on any platform I’ve ever tried.

So the next time someone sends you a document with the latest Word 2014 .docxyz format, simply reply:

This file format is not supported by my computer. Please save the document as Rich Text Format (RTF) and resend. That way all recipients can open it. Thank you!

What if you could see staff costs when booking a meeting?

Meetings, meetings and more meetings is something most people book as long as people keep showing up. We don’t normally get an invoice for the cost of the time we take from the attendees, so we have little incentive to care.

What if the meeting booking application could calculate the staff costs when planning the meeting?

Based on the participants hourly cost, you simply add it all up and display it so the organizer can see it when booking the meeting.

Showing the actual cost of the meeting in money, would make people think twice. Maybe they would book less people for less time. Or even better, rethink the meeting, have a crystal-clear purpose and a solid agenda,to justify the meeting both to themselves and to the participants.

Another positive effect of being reminded of the true cost of a meeting, is that you would realize just how, in comparison, trivial the cost is of treating people to some food or pastries during your (now 20-minute-long) meeting.

Don’t use images in your email signature. Ever.

Maybe you think a logo or other image in your email signature looks cool and professional. Maybe it does. But I assure you, broken images, incorrect file counts, lost attachments and general confusion does not.

Here’s why you should never ever use an image in your email signature.

Images may not be displayed properly, depending on the recipients email application or its settings, especially when an email gets forwarded.  A broken image next to your name just looks plain unprofessional.

The image is a file attachment, so all your emails will be marked as having attachments. It makes it harder to notice when you have manually attached a file. The total count of attached files will be incorrect since it adds the image(s) in your signature. Also it will be impossible to sort or filter your messages on attachments.
Messages in HTML format is a way to make the image not be categorized as an attachment, but there is no guarantee it will work depending on settings, and images in HTML messages are more likely to be blocked by the application.

You don’t want to be the reason for this conversation:

-Did you get my email?
-Which one?
-The one with the files.
-Er, they all have attached files as far as I can see.
-This one has eight files in it.
-I have no email from you with eight files. The closest is nine.
-That’s wrong. I sent you eight.

Combining Pomodoro and Inbox Zero

One way to combine the Pomodoro technique and the Inbox Zero principle “Schedule email dashes” is to simply do a pomodoro and instead of just a 5-minute break, you add 5 minutes of email checking to the pattern.

One more reason to keep your inbox empty

Last Tuesday I had a scheduled meeting with a client.

Monday I was on vacation.

Monday the client postponed the meeting by email.

My Out-of-Office reply informed him that I did not read my emails that day.

His inbox was flooded, so he didn’t even see my autoreply.

Tuesday morning I was at his office, and he greeted me saying “So you didn’t get my email?”

It could happen to anyone, but it’s just another reason to keep your inbox empty.