If you need a place to keep track of meetings and meeting notes (and really, who doesn’t these days), you might be interested in a neat Rhodia product that I recently found out about: the spiralbound meeting book. At the top of each page, you can enter in the date of your meeting along with a brief summary; the bottom portion is split into two columns for notes and action items. The meeting book comes in a variety of colors and sizes—quite a nifty little notebook!
In an interesting article that I blogged about earlier this week, I learned about a new productivity initiative called the Results Only Work Environment, or ROWE. ROWE encourages employees to focus on accomplishing their work and to spend whatever time remains doing anything they like; the philosophy, as the article explains, is that “it’s the work that matters, not the method.”
I poked around online this morning in an attempt to find out more. According to a Business Week article, ROWE began a couple of years ago as a covert guerrilla movement among Best Buy employees. Eventually, it reached Chief Executive Brad Anderson, who decided to introduce it as official policy; by the end of 2007, all 4,000 staffers working at corporate will be on ROWE. Anderson and his team have since formed a subsidiary called CultureRx to help other companies go clockless.
As a freelance writer, I work from home and set my own schedule as a matter of course. But I’d be curious to hear what our readers think about ROWE. Is it a brilliant initiative or something that’s poised to destroy the demarcation between work and personal time?
Somehow, I managed to miss this New York Times article about wasting time until it turned up in Arts & Letters Daily (which is, incidentally, one of my favorite online aggregators of academic and literary news).
Anyway, the article talks about two seemingly conflicting trends: we are both working harder these days (logging 70-plus hour work weeks and multitasking when we’re at home) and wasting more time (checking email, trying to find that document at the bottom of a pile of papers, sitting through meetings and conference calls that might last about half as long as they do).
But according to productivity experts, we’re wasting time because we’re working harder—because we need a little down time in order to accomplish everything we’ve set out to do. Working energy, says Bob Kustka, a Massachusetts based time-management expert, “is best used in spurts where we work hard on a few focused activities and then take a brief respite.”
By far the coolest part of the piece, however, came towards the end:
At the headquarters of Best Buy in Minneapolis, for instance, the hot policy of the moment is called ROWE, short for Results Only Work Environment.
There workers can come in at four or leave at noon, or head for the movies in the middle of the day, or not even show up at all. It’s the work that matters, not the method. And, not incidentally, both output and job satisfaction have jumped wherever ROWE is tried.
Going to have to do some more research into that one…
I went on a lighthouse cruise sponsored by East End Lighthouses, Inc. We were scheduled to visit 12 lighthouses, including my three favorites: “Bug Light,” Race Rock and North Dumpling. Each lighthouse is unique. Together they have many stories to tell: the lives of the lighthouse keepers and their families; War of 1812-era skirmishes between the British and Americans that were fought around them; and the whalers, freighters, fishermen and travelers that passed by.
I love lighthouses because of their link to our history and their place in our present. If our boat’s radar didn’t work we would rely on lighthouses to guide us the same as mariners did 150 years ago. Lighthouses are landmarks, and as such are part of any plan to find our way out to sea and back home again.
During our trip we felt the tail-end of Tropical Storm Bob. Although we were cruising on a 160′, state-of-the-art, wave-piercing catamaran we were rocking and rolling with the swells. I couldn’t stand long enough to zip up my rain jacket. One woman ended up very sick from a reaction to Dramamine and had to be evacuated to New London. Good preparation by all for rain gear, but most of us weren’t used to being out on the water in heavy surf.
Being in the midst of the fog, rain and waves gave me a great respect for people who plied the waters of Long Island Sound and Block Island Sound and beyond in sailing ships and steamers. They survived on the water by their skills, experience and knowledge of the seasons. And a readiness to meet and adapt to the unexpected.
Ever since I read Karen’s post about the Pace of Life Project—which shows that people are walking faster and faster in cities all over the world—I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how quickly we live life. Evidently, sneaker companies have been thinking about it, too. Reebok’s new Run Easy ad campaign is all over New York City subways, and they’ve also recently run a couple of ads on television. The point of the campaign is to encourage people to slow down and have fun while they jog, rather than taking the amped up, competitive approach of Reebok’s competitor, Nike. (Presumably, they’d also like to sell some sneakers.)
It’s an interesting tactic, and probably better aligned with what most of us can hope to accomplish during our workouts. Nonetheless, I do love watching what the human body is capable of, and for that, Nike’s ads are pretty darn satisfying. (This one, which shows parkour expert Sebastian Foucan outmaneuvering a chicken, is a particular favorite.)
