I’ve always hated the idea of working 9 to 5.  It’s a remnant from the command and control structure of factories (and to a lesser extent farming.)  In those environments all your employees needed to be in one spot, working together.   After all, it’s hard to run an assembly line if someone’s missing from their post. But in today’s create on demand world, is that kind of structure necessary anymore? I say no.  But more than that, my suspicion is that chaining someone to a desk from 9 to ...

I bought a Dyson Vacuum this weekend.  It cost a lot of money.  In fact it cost more money than I ever dreamed of spending on a vacuum.  But marriage has a way of changing how you look at things! We’ve only been using it for about a week, so it’s too early to know if it is actually worth the money (about 400% over it’s “competitors”).  But on the first few uses, my wife and I are shocked (and a little horrified) at how well it ...

Impossible goals are a bad idea.  Why?  Because no one likes the idea of tackling a project which will certainly fail.  That's why very difficult goals have a way of reducing  performance. Not only that, but believing goals are impossible can lead people to take unethical actions.  Students are more likely to cheat on tests where they think they don’t have a chance, and believe no amount of studying would help.  Business people are more likely to use fraud or investment schemes if they think there’s no ...

One of the world’s most famous quotes is: “May you live in interesting times.”  It’s not meant as a good thing. The irony is, everyone has always lived in interesting times.  The world is in a constant state of change.  That’s no more true today, then it was 100 or 1000 years ago.  What is different is the speed of that change.  It took hundreds of years for society to go from using polished bronze to silver backed glass to create something you and I use every ...

We’ve discussed the power of past choices on Meaning to Work before.  (As an example I showed a study by Ariely, Lowenstein, and Prelac that found people arbitrarily anchor new decisions based on previous decisions.  Meaning that something as simple as buying a bottle of wine could be influenced by something as random as your social security number.) This has obvious ...