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Reading is Real Work

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A good word from Gordon MacDonald’s Ordering Your Private World:

Some months ago I led a seminar for pastors on the subject of preaching, and discussed the matters of study and preparation. Since a number of spouses were present when I spoke, I said to the group, “Now, some of you may be tempted to think that when your spouse is reading, they are really expending second-class time. So you are liable to feel free to interrupt them on impulse. What you need to realize is that they are working every bit as much as the carpenter who is in his shop sharpening the blade of a saw. Within reason, you ought not only to avoid interrupting your spouses, but also to try your best to maximize their privacy if you want them to grow in effectiveness.”

Two additional thoughts. First, the main thing I want to emphasize here is not his point on interruptions (though that is an important consideration — as long as taken together with his “within reason”). Rather, the main thing I want to emphasize is simply that reading is real work. When the purpose is study and learning, it is not second-class, throw-away time.

Second, the importance of reading is true not just for pastors, but for people in all vocations. Everyone in any vocation should devote time to reading and studying to advance their skills and ability to be effective in what they do. And when you do this, it is not leisure time, but real, first-rate work that is just as important (perhaps more important) than the rest of the work that you do.

Usable Web Forms are a Form of Marketing

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Seth Godin recounts a painful experience filling out a form on the Jet Blue website. Here’s the key point:

The problem with letting your web forms become annoying is that in terms of time spent interacting with your brand, they’re way up on the list. If someone is spending a minute or two or three or four cursing you out from their desk, it’s not going to be easily fixed with some clever advertising.

In other words: Take some of that money you might have spent on advertising (print or online) and make your website more usable. That treats your customers or constituents better and will have more impact because giving your customers a good experience builds your brand far more effectively than any ad could.

3 Strategies for Stepping Higher

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Even though they are primarily writing for those in their teens, Alex and Brett Harris have good counsel everyone in Do Hard Things. Here’s one helpful piece:

  1. Do what’s hard for you.
  2. Be known for what you do (more than for what you don’t).
  3. Pursue excellence, not excuses.

3 Basic Laws of Idea Generation and Human Nature, and Why It's Bad to Make Employees Sit at Their Desks for a Defined Period

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Excellent, from Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality:

As you develop some norms and expectations for your team’s work flow, try to elevate true productivity over the appearance of hard work.

Managers instinctively measure work ethic with an eye on the clock. Measuring work by time spent working is seductive, because it’s easy and objective. But doing so defies the realities of the creative work flow and will ultimately damage morale.

In reality, ideas are made to happen in spurts.

The pressure of being required to sit at your desk until a certain time creates a factory-like culture that ignores a few basic laws of idea generation and human nature:

  1. When the brain is tired, it doesn’t work well.
  2. Idea generation happens on its own terms.
  3. When you feel forced to execute beyond your capacity, you begin to hate what you are doing.

Rather than focusing on face time, creative teams should embrace transparency and strive to build a fundamental trust between colleagues. As leaders, we must create rules and norms for the sake of efficiency rather than as a result of mistrust. We should measure tangible outputs like actions taken and quality of outcomes.

Which leads to the concept of a “results only work environment” — where “employees are compensated based on their achievement of specified goals rather than on the number of hours worked. The ultimate goal is to empower employees to make their own decisions about when and where they work as long as mutually agreed-upon goals are achieved. This means that bosses stop watching employee calendars and paying attention to when people arrive and leave the office.”

For more on the idea of a results only work environment, see the ROWE Blog and the book Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It (which I wish had a different title, but oh well), both of which are by the two former Best Buy employees who pioneered this approach at Best Buy (seeing productivity go up something like 35% in some departments) and are helping spread it to more and more companies.