Gone in 60 seconds

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Tom

‘Gone in 60 Seconds’, the 2000 Jerry Bruckheimer remake with Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie, showed how you can steal any car in under 60 seconds.  Though I’m sure it wasn’t the intention of Bruckheimer to make people think, but there’s a lot of things you can do under 60 seconds.

- Write down the synopsis of [...]

How are you wasting your time?

Posted on June 29, 2010 by Tom

I like Umberto Eco, not (only) because he’s a great writer, historian, philosopher or critic, but because he’s all of that at the same time.  He finds a way to perform hugely time-consuming tasks and have a great life at the same time and still finds time to fulfil his duties at the university.

How does he do [...]

Your private oasis

Posted on June 27, 2009 by Tom

Freelancers, small companies, start-ups,…  It’s not unusual they work over 80 hours week.  Their livelihood depends on their success, they don’t have anything else to count on.  If they don’t do it, no-one else will.  So they work, every minute of the day, 7 days a week, just to be sure they’ll be fine.

You have [...]

It’s not your goal

Posted on May 21, 2009 by Tom

It seems that with every minute that goes by you’re working for someone else instead of for yourself.  You feel totally out of control and you haven’t got a clue why? It happens especially with people who’re higher up the ladder or people with a larger than normal sense of responsibility.
 
The problem starts when the line [...]

How to get the most out of meetings

Posted on May 3, 2009 by Tom

One to start the week.  “Death by meeting”, a great book by Patrick Lencioni that should be given to everyone who has to lead a team.  Because a lot of managers can’t grasp how time consuming these can be.  Lencioni describes with an imagined example how some meetings are totally useless and eventually do more harm [...]

Patience is a virtue

Posted on April 8, 2009 by Tom

“The customer is always right”.  There’s not a day that goes by when someone utters that sentence, probably related to a complaint that came in.  Problem is we take that sentence way to seriously while companies have gotten more and more customer friendly and customers got more and more demanding.  They want it better and more [...]