I will blog on iPads coming up if I get the chance. I do have one and have found that it solves trillions of productivity problems.
One gap right now is that OmniFocus is not yet available. You can run the iPhone version, but there are lots of limitations to that. Fortunately, it looks like a version of OmniFocus developed to take full advantage of the iPad will be releasing in June. Here’s an update from their site.
From Drucker’s The Effective Executive:
The effective executive makes strength productive. He knows that one cannot build on weakness. To achieve results, one has to use all the available strengths–the strengths of associates, the strengths of the superior, and one’s own strengths. These strengths are the true opportunities. To make strength productive is the unique purpose of organization. It cannot, of course, overcome the weaknesses with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant. Its task is to use the strength of each man as a building block for joint performance.
Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is fantastic and I will be blogging on it if I get the chance. One of his points is that extrinsic motivators often back-fire and decrease commitment to a task. We shouldn’t dismiss extrinsic motivation altogether, but it needs to be very secondary and used right. The primary way to motivate is create the conditions that foster intrinsic motivation–that tap the inherent worth of the task. Which usually means simply making sure not to get in the way of how people are naturally motivated.
Extrinsic motivation is most relevant when a task is routine. But when it comes to creative tasks and the typical nonroutine tasks of the knowledge worker, extrinsic motivation can decrease not only commitment to the task, but also the original and creative thought that is necessary to finding your way.
Here are the seven deadly flaws of the “carrot and stick” approach (extrinsic motivation) that he discusses in chapter 2:
Again, his point is not that extrinsic motivation is always bad, but that it can be.
I was just pointed to the iPad app Priority Matrix [opens in iTunes], which allows you to visually organize tasks into the four quadrants of urgent and important, urgent but not important, important but not urgent, and not important and not urgent.
I was pleasantly surprised by the program. I like being able to see tasks visually separated in this way, and the program is very easy to use. I see some potential here for possibly keeping my daily list, since the OmniFocus interface has not yet been adapted to the iPad.
Here’s a video showing how it works:
There is a class I know of (elementary school) where the teacher gives out hardly any top grades (it’s a complex system–it’s not just a matter of As, Bs, etc., or even just 1, 2, 3). The thinking, it is said, is that no one is perfect, and there always needs to be room to improve.
I’m sure there is more to the rationale, but is this a good idea? No. This is called the strictness error and it is demotivating. Managers can hold to the same error when it comes to performance reviews. Hence, the problems of the strictness error for both contexts is well explained by these comments in the book Management Skills:
The strictness error is the flip side of leniency. You rate everyone very strictly. While it is acceptable to maintain high standards, performance appraisals should be an accurate reflection of performance. Appraisals that are too strict will de-motivate employees and frustrate them. They will begin to think that no matter what they do, it will never enable them to achieve the rewards that they value. [I would restate the last part of the sentence, because it sounds too extrinsically motivated, but you get the point.]
The strictness error, as mentioned, is the opposite of the leniency error. You don’t want to error on that side, either, whether in education or management. The lenience error
provides employees with high performance appraisal ratings for mediocre or marginal performance. This marginal performer is then ‘rewarded’ in organizational terms. This will increase the likelihood that his or her marginal performance will continue–because they have no incentive to improve.
Of course, the one other issue raised here for the arena of management is whether the traditional concept of a performance appraisal is a good idea at all. It is, and should, seem a bit odd that I am able to make a comparison between how we treat elementary students and how we treat adults on the job.
It is critical that people receive feedback on results and are held accountable for meeting the defined outcomes they are responsible to produce, and that this be done through a regular routine of meetings and conversations. But whether this should include or be wrapped in with a detailed performance appraisal that effectively ranks or grades people is an open question, in my view.
If you create too many rules in your organization (or home, or anywhere), you start to kill learning. Marcus Buckingham states this well in First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently:
“Every time you make a rule you take away a choice and choice, with all of its illuminating repercussions, is the fuel for learning.”
Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has a really good review of the iPad. He argues that the iPad may be a true “game changer.” Here’s how the WSJ summarizes his article:
Apple’s new touch-screen device has the potential to change portable computing profoundly. It could challenge the primacy of the laptop and eventually propel the multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface.
Here’s another interesting part:
The iPad is much more than an e-book or digital periodical reader, though it does those tasks brilliantly, better in my view than the Amazon Kindle. And it’s far more than just a big iPhone, even though it uses the same easy-to-master interface, and Apple says it runs nearly all of the 150,000 apps that work on the iPhone.
It’s qualitatively different, a whole new type of computer that, through a simple interface, can run more-sophisticated, PC-like software than a phone does, and whose large screen allows much more functionality when compared with a phone’s. But, because the iPad is a new type of computer, you have to feel it, to use it, to fully understand it and decide if it is for you, or whether, say, a netbook might do better.
In this video, John Piper explains why he invited Rick Warren to our fall conference (as many of you know, I work at Desiring God):
And here’s a short transcript from Piper talking about why he invited Warren last month to a group of pastors:
[When I wrote Warren to invite him,] I said, “The conference is called ‘THINK: The life of the Mind and the Love of God.’ I want you to come. You are the most well known pragmatist pastor in the world. I don’t think you are a pragmatist at root. Come and tell us why thinking Biblically matters to you in your amazingly pragmatic approach to ministry.”
I want him to lay his cards on the table. I want him to tell us what makes him tick. Because he does come across in much of what he says and does as very results-oriented and pragmatic and not theologically driven, and yet, [Piper finishes up this thought a few minutes later] …. at root I think he is theological.
I have a lot that I have to get done today, but if I can I will try to write a post later today on 4 reasons why it is good and important that Rick Warren is coming to the Desiring God conference.
Good, from Newsweek.
It’s usually a bad idea not to include page numbers on multi-page documents. Adding them manually to every document, however, creates an extra step that is better removed by making page numbers a default part of the template. However, if you are on a Mac and use Microsoft Word for Mac, it is hard to figure out how to make the template automatically include them.
I finally looked in to how to do this, and found a forum that contains a solution that works.
First, here’s a more detailed statement of the problem, which explains the very complication that I used to run into whenever I would try this before:
I am using Word 2008 for Mac. I always want page numbers, but I always need to select it from the Insert menu. Is there a way to make this the default so I don’t have to manually select it every time? I have tried this: See the Word help topic ” Template locations in Word” for more information, which says to edit the Normal template and add them there: they will then appear in every new document I create. But this doesn’t seem to help. When I open the Normal.dotm file, it appears as Document 1, so I can’t actually change Normal.dotm. I can make a new Page Numbers doc but I’ll have to select it to use it. How do I make a default Normal, or how can I get Page Numbers to open as the default?
Here’s the solution that was proposed:
Open Word, New document, select File Open. Navigate to where normal.dotm is located: /Users/you/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/normal.dotm
Open it and make the changes to it that you desire. Save normal.dotm, save all, and close Word. Open Word again and the changes you made should be reflected as part of the normal template. The old normal template will be renamed and saved in the same location as a backup.
Now I can add: that solution works.
