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The Wonder of Apple's Tablet

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The Washington Post has a good article on the much-rumored Apple tablet. Here’s the best part:

Conventional wisdom suggests that Apple will not be able to succeed where so many others have failed. But Apple makes billions defying conventional wisdom.

The truth is that most of us don’t understand the allure of a tablet computer because they’ve all sucked up until now. It’s the exact same reason that I didn’t understand the iPhone at first. My cellphones leading up to the iPhone ranged from “okay” to “junk.” The idea of getting one with such a high price tag was insanity to me. But within seconds of using the iPhone, I was able to tell that Apple had made something completely different. It wasn’t a cellphone as I had known them. It redefined the category. And while there are no sure things in the tech world, I would bet that Apple’s tablet will do the same.

The Decade Review

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At the end of a year, it’s always good to reflect on major happenings, accomplishments, and lessons learned. At the end of a decade, it’s good to do this reflection for the whole decade.

So, that is my recommendation for you today. It doesn’t have to take long. Create a Word document, call it “Decade Review” or something, and take maybe thirty minutes to jot down whatever comes to mind in these three areas:

  1. Stand-out events, happenings, and accomplishments over the last ten years.
  2. Lessons learned.
  3. Course corrections and key items of focus for the next set of years.

Create three a heading in the document for each of these things; maybe call them “Happenings and Accomplishments,” “Lessons Learned,” and “Focus Items Going Forward.”

It doesn’t have to be fancy or detailed. Mostly, the usefulness of this comes simply from the act of taking some time to reflect. You can really do this any time, but the end of a decade is a good milestone that serves as a catalyst.

It's the End of the Year: Give

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My local Christian radio station was asking for money yesterday.

There are two ways to look at that. The first would be to say: “Stop asking. You just had your share-a-ton two months ago. You’ve received enough from the people of this city, and if it wasn’t not enough to make your budget, deal with it.”

This way looks at society as doing the radio station a favor to let it be on the air. Sure, we’ll help you a little bit when it’s convenient, but please don’t ask for too much. We have other things going on.

Looking at things in this way would be wrong. Very, very wrong.

The second way to look at this says: “This station is worthy of being supported. Giving to this cause is not simply a discretionary act; the station deserves it’s support. It ought to be the case that many people give.”

This second way to look at things is the right way. For it realizes that we are not the ones who are doing the radio station a favor by “letting it exist if we give,” but rather the radio station is doing us a favor.

It is doing us a favor in two senses. First, it is doing us a favor simply by operating and proclaiming it’s message — even if we ourselves are not the primary listeners. It’s existence serves the public good. Second, it is doing us a favor by not insisting on its rights.

It is not insisting on its rights because it doesn’t require payment, but instead humbly asks for support, without creating a sense of obligation. I realize that there wouldn’t be a practical way to require payment to listen to a radio station. But to focus on that would be to miss my point.

What I mean is this: If you go to Target, you have to pay for what you get. So also if you go to Applebee’s or Amazon. They have a right to charge, and they do.

But when you benefit from a non-profit (either directly, in the case of a radio station, or indirectly, because it is an avenue through which we can help make the world a better place), you often don’t have to pay for what you get. This can have the side effect of making it look like what they do is not as worthy of payment as what Target or Amazon or Applebee’s does. It makes it look like they exist simply by virtue of the sheer grace of our society and a few generous donors, whereas for-profits deserve to exist (assuming people are willing to purchase their goods at a profit).

But, as is often the case, the appearances here are upside down.

It is not that “payment optional” means “less worthy to exist” and “payment required” means “we are the greatest thing since sliced bread — people pay for what we offer.”

“Payment optional” may in fact be a humble indication, in God’s design, that says: “The work this organization is doing is so important that people aren’t charged for it. The fact that the organization has to depend upon gifts is not a sign that it is less important, but is actually an indication that what they are doing is even more worthy of existing than many of the things that you pay for every day.”

This is not to diminish the great work that business accomplishes. Business serves society and is a high calling. It is a fundamental component not only of how society operates, but also for how we need to address many long-term societal problems (such as poverty in the developing world).

My point here is simply this: don’t conclude from the humble, simple requests that so many non-profits are making this time of year into thinking that non-profits are merely “nice-to-haves” that we do the favor of keeping in existence. Instead, realize that the fact that they are dependent upon gifts is, perhaps, precisely the mark that they are doing great work, perhaps some of the most important in the world.

Which means: your opportunity to give is an opportunity to be a part of something great. Take this opportunity at the end of the year to give.

And, since it’s also the end of the decade, maybe even give a little more.

Advice for the Next Decade

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Friday is the first day not just of a new year, but of a new decade. It makes sense to do some reflection in light of this, and to make some changes.

To help serve your efforts, I’m going to recommend one simple change for the next decade: Create one new, recurring routine in an area of high impact.

The way to make sure you actually stick to this routine is to set aside time for it. Which means: Create an appointment on your calendar for this routine and set it to repeat every week or every day. Then, keep the appointment.

After one year — let alone ten — you will see remarkable results.

Some obvious examples here might be prayer and Bible study, if you have a hard time being as consistent as you want. Another example could be weekly time for writing, or weekly (or daily) time for reading.

The time you allocate need not be extensive. The real impact in this comes from consistency over time, rather than quantity in the moment. Reading for half an hour each night, consistently, over the course of a year would yield significant returns. So would spending two hours every Saturday morning writing on important issues in your field, or in any area of interest. Or taking each of your kids out for one-on-one time once a month.

As it has been often said, “small things, done consistently over time, make a big impact.”

Now, for those who want to go a bit deeper, here’s a twist: this can work against us, as well — even in the case of good routines. When the good things we do consistently over time take time away from doing better things consistently over time, they diminish our effectiveness.

Hence, for those interested in taking things to the “advanced” level, a corollary to my advice here is to also identify one routine you can stop doing, or reduce, in order to make room for this more important routine.

The significance of both sides here — the impact of doing small things consistently, and the need to make sure that these small things are the best use of our time — has stood out to me even more of late as I’ve looked back on one particular routine of my own that I’m changing up.

Back in 1999, at the beginning of this decade, I started tracking our finances in Quicken. Eventually this turned into a routine of managing our finances and tracking our budget every Saturday morning. A few years later I read David Allen, and this time naturally expanded to include processing my inbox (personal, not work) and doing other household, administrative, and “getting things done” maintenance stuff.

The result is that I became quite good at dispatching with my workflow, and our credit score went off the charts. And those are things that I don’t want to lose ground on. But I wonder if, at the same time, this has crowded out some more important things I could have been doing in that time slot.

In one sense, this type of routine is driven by necessity and is quite efficient — you have to deal with both workflow and finances, and it makes a ton of sense to have a regular routine for dispatching these things. That is not something that should change.

But, I’m changing up this routine a bit to reflect more fully the fact that these things are not close to the “impact line” (for lack of a better term). They are essential, but they are supporting disciplines. You do need to spend time on them, but you want to keep it to a minimum.

The world of work provides a good example here. If you work at a for-profit, you want as much of your time as possible to be spent on tasks that are close to the revenue line. Likewise, in life you want as much of your time as possible to be spent on tasks that are close to the impact line.

Now, managing my workflow and keeping up with the finances hasn’t been taking a ton of time on my Saturday mornings (except when I have to skip a few weeks in a row!). But I still think to myself “if these tasks became so easy and basic simply by doing them consistently, how much progress would I have made if I had devoted some of that time each week to making progress on some additional things that were of greater impact?” I’ve already designated that time for work-type stuff (on the personal front), so why not redouble my efforts to preserve the bulk of that time for higher impact things?

I’d rather spend time getting some extra writing done, or staying in touch with a few more people, than becoming flawless at keeping up with my inbox. Not that you have to ultimately choose — I am not advocating that we not keep up with our workflow. Not keeping up with your workflow is like not taking out the trash — it will end up just getting in the way and mucking everything up. Part of my point, as always, is that we need to be as efficient as we can at our workflow processes so that we can spend as much time as possible on what is most important.

But my fuller point here is that what you actually schedule will have more impact than what you simply intend. This works on both fronts. First, it means that if you simply create a recurring appointment to do something of great importance, you will find great results over time. And second, it means that you need to make sure that the routines you create really advance your most important priorities, rather than simply things that are good but not best.

Therefore, be intentional in leveraging the fact that small things, done consistently over time, have a large impact. Create a new routine in an area of high impact for the new decade and, if necessary, reduce or eliminate something else to make room for it.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

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I hope that everyone had a good Christmas and is looking forward to the new year (new decade, actually). Thanks again to everyone for reading!

I’ve been posting a bit less the last few weeks of the year so that I can focus more fully on some large projects. I’ll probably have a few more posts this week, and then it will be back to normal in the new year.

A Management Pop Quiz

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I’ve been enjoying the book What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer. Pfeffer is a professor of organizational behavior at the Standord Graduate School of Business and former columnist for Business 2.0.

Pfeffer argues that most poor business choices arise when leaders do one of three things:

  1. Fail to consider the unintended consequences of their actions.
  2. Rely on naive theories of human behavior (such as “the great jackass method” [that’s Stephen Covey’s term — not mine!] of the carrot and the stick).
  3. Ignore obvious answers and make things more complicated than they really are.

(As an aside — the resemblance here to the cause of bad decisions in economics and politics is quite interesting, although I don’t know yet if Pfeffer makes the connection.)

To test your application of these concepts, here are a few questions from the “pop quiz” on the back cover:

Are you concerned that your employees are spending too much time surfing the web? You shouldn’t be. By monitoring their downtime, you’re destroying their trust — and ultimately hurting your business.

Your bottom line looks like trouble. Where can you save money? Don’t touch your employees’ benefits. Short-term financial trouble is no excuse for cuts. You’ll pay the human cost in the long-run.

Your employees work long hours. Does all that time really pay? Hours-in does not equal good work-out. The absence of time with family and friends is one of the reasons U.S. health care costs are soaring, including employer health costs.