Author: Bengt (Page 42 of 81)

Dan North on Our Obsession with Efficiency

November 28, 2009 /

When browsing Øredev’s videos from the 2009 conference I found another one that interests me. Dan North talks about Our Obsession with Efficiency.

The description says:

So here’s the thing, I don’t believe in efficiency. It’s our obsession with efficiency that has got us into the current technology mess, and which has led almost directly to heavy waterfall processes. Efficiency is how you let the big vendors sell their bloated technologies to the poor CIOs.

Dan talks about efficiency (doing things right) versus effectiveness (doing the right things). One of his comments is that Effectiveness is often inefficient.

Hans Rosling: Asia’s rise — how and when

November 26, 2009 /

A post at Presentation Zen, Hans Rosling & the art of storytelling with statistics, took me to TED and the presentation by Hans Rosling at TEDIndia.

Hans Rosling was a young guest student in India when he first realized that Asia had all the capacities to reclaim its place as the world’s dominant economic force. At TEDIndia, he graphs global economic growth since 1858 and predicts the exact date that India and China will outstrip the US.

It’s a great presentation, Hans Rosling is terrific when it comes to presenting stats and graphs that really catches the audience attention.

Scott Hanselman on Information Overload and Managing the Flow

November 25, 2009 /

The videos from Øredev 2009 are starting to show up. Scott Hanselman had a keynote on Information Overload and Managing the Flow that I missed at the conference but now have seen on video.

The program text says:

As developers, we are asked to absorb even more information than ever before. More APIs, more documentation, more patterns, more layers of abstraction. Now Twitter and Facebook compete with Email and Texts for our attention, keeping us up-to-date on our friends dietary details and movie attendance second-by-second. Does all this information take a toll on your psyche or sharpen the saw? Is it a matter of finding the right tools to capture what you need, or do you just need to unplug.

Scott talks about effectiveness (doing the right things, moving the ball forward) and efficiency (doing things right). He covers many ideas and concepts like email rules, the importance of triage (decide if deal with or not, when), The Pomodoro Technique, Dave Allen’s GTD, Covey’s quadrants and the principles of flow.

Scott also says that the optimal number of threads in a system (including us humans) is one, in other words no multitasking. When it comes to tools Scott recommends Evernote for information storage and Remember The Milk for to-do-lists. Personally I am not keen on computerized to-do-lists, I prefer to write lists by hand.

Do what matters most

November 18, 2009 /

The book Accomplishing More by Doing Less by Marc Lesser is a collection of tools as well as a manual for doing more of what is important and less of what isn’t. It’s a great book and it made me think of what matters when it comes to my blogs.

I love to write but I am no longer keen on maintaining more blogs than really needed. A self-hosted WordPress blog requires maintenance, work behind the scen. My solution is that I cut down on the number of blogs I have plus use Posterous for some of my content.

Forty Plus Two will be discontinued, new posts will appear here in Bengt’s Notes which will be my main blog in English. I will gradually transfer older posts from Forty Plus Two to this blog.

Forty Plus Two focused on coaching and personal development plus some on related topics such as networking, business, job and career. They will continue here at Bengt’s Notes. Side topics like blogging and WordPress continue at Bengt’s posterous.

Under Archives is a description of what’s covered in this blog. My sites shows the whole picture, what do I cover where.

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