Dan Benjamin¹ writes about Offices and the Creativity Zone and makes about a million good points.

There’s no choice about how or when you’re expected produce, or under what circumstances. Here is your computer, here is your workstation, you have the tools, the florescent lights are turned on, why don’t you go ahead and get to work, thanks, bye.

I’m beginning to think that when you boil things down to their core, the modern day ‘knowledge worker’ has two functions: creation and collaboration. And for the latter, the office environment can be important. I love online collaboration environments as much as the next person, but there’s always something to be said for the face-to-face meeting, where ideas fly over the boardroom table. It’s a proven method, and will always be enough to justify traditional office space.

But the creative element is a whole different matter. For that we are uniquely individual in our needs and practices.

Unfortunately, most people can’t simply step into The [creative] Zone. In the very same way you’d want to find the right time and place to read a book, creative types need to setup the specific conditions they need to enter The Zone. For some people, this might mean listening to a certain kind of music. It might be fueled by caffeine and a dark room late at night. Some people work best in the silence of the early morning. It all depends on the person.

One of the major symptoms of the shift to the information age is that more and more of your employees are doing work that requires creativity. Stuff like answering phones, filling out forms, data entry, tech support, purchase order accounting and so on, is either less important or has been outsourced to another organization halfway around the world. In smaller businesses, especially, it’s important to understand that everyone can be (and should be) a creative worker, but it will only happen if you give them the flexibility, freedom and motivation to find their ‘creative zone’ in relation to the work you’ve asked them to do. And if that zone happens to be outside the wall of your office then, well, who cares?

And definitely don’t do this:

Of course it makes sense why corporations work this way, but that doesn’t mean that this is the right setting for creative people. The corporate world rewards based on perceived productivity rather than accomplishment. People who arrive at work at 8am, take a 30 minute lunch break (at their desk), and leave at 6pm are usually congratulated regardless of their real accomplishments, while those who struggle with corporate schedules but produce brilliant work (delivered on time) are often penalized.

The hour is an irrelevant metric in most work. Smash the clock.

1. Benamin, with John Gruber also regularly appears on the excellent podcast The Talk Show [↩]

I’ve already written a bit about electronic books and the notion of a paperless world, but Todd Shultz got me thinking about the topic again in a different light.

If you haven’t noticed already, all mediums are starting to shift towards the internet. People are actually spending more time on the internet than watching TV. (I know I do) The internet is too great a location for advertisers to ignore. I am inclined to believe that print media will suffer a lot in the coming years. Who needs a newspaper when you can go on to CNN.com? Perezhilton.com has all of the tabloid lovers. Anything you can find on the newstands, you can probably find on a blog or a website.

This is pretty much impossible to dispute. Circulation on magazines is way down and book sales have been mostly flat. I guess it makes sense, then, that the question everyone is asking is this: is print dead?

The Difference Between Death and Irrelevance

Erin and I have had lots of conversation about this topic (we both tend to side with the “yes, dying or dead” camp, for what it’s worth) but lately I’ve been thinking about the idea of print as an industry in a whole new light. The battle lines have been drawn as print-versus-technology but that’s not really apt, when you get right down to it. Because consumers aren’t buying the material — the paper, the ink, the glass, the microchips, the whatever — they’re buying the stories.

Products should be defined based on why the user buys or needs them, not based on the physical materials that make up the product. An example: We don’t (or, more accurately, didn’t) buy audio CDs because we liked the shiny colourful back surface or the way it spun in the player. We bought audio CDs because we wanted to hear music.

Painting the battle as print-versus-technology is akin to vinyl-versus-CD or, hell, buying coke in a plastic bottle versus a glass bottle. In either case, the product is the same. Schultz points that out perfectly in his post: the stuff on the internet is the same product as the stuff on the newsstand (or on TV).

No funeral march for ink and paper

The technology isn’t there yet, so we’re still a ways away from the true shift from print to purely tech-based content. But it’s looming, and anyone who claims otherwise is probably burying their head in the sand. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Like with any shift, the only people who will be hurt or left behind by the shift are those who refuse to see it coming.

The market still wants the product — they want news and gossip, comedy and drama, fiction and non-fiction, art and pornography — but now it will be beamed to them, through devices that sit on a desk or fit in a hand (some of these devices might look just like paper). And, yes, this draws all sorts of questions about monetizing and content customization and the dynamics of publishing-as-business but the bottom line is simply this: people still want what publishers are selling. You’ll be okay.

What Gen Y should do

One of the most changed dynamics will be the ‘opening up’ of the content creation process. Whereas in the past writing went through a sort of ‘funnel’ through editors, publishers and printers before making it to the public, we’re at a place now where any business can make themselves visible instantly. For most organizations, then, a good, solid, web-savvy writer is going to be nothing short of a weapon. Remember that as you build your skills for your career.

Photo by oskay. Licensed under Creative Commons

Despite all anecdotal evidence, a lot of Gen Yers still tend to worry a lot about their potential in the job market. It’s probably due to the experiences their parents and older siblings may have had entering the workforce decades ago, struggling to find anything but the dreaded McJob. It’s so bad that this trepidation sometimes causes people to turtle themselves in academic institutions, piling on degrees and diplomas in the hopes of guaranteeing career potential right out of the gate.

The truth of the matter is that all that education, while undoubtedly important for other reasons, isn’t entirely necessary. Because, in the end, Generation Y’s secret weapon for career success is simply demographics.

Since the first wave of baby boomers reached the age of 60 in 2006 and have entered retirement, an increasing number of professionals are leaving the job market each year. So it’s not surprising that more than 80% of employers say they are concerned about a looming shortage of qualified workers.

There’s little reason today for Gen Y to fear the job hunt (though obviously this can’t hold true for all sectors — some are in steep decline) because there are simply more job openings coming down the pipeline than there are workers.

That said, the word ‘qualified’ in the above quote is extremely important. More on that in a later post.

Listen, young office young workers, odds are that as the youthful, tech-savvy person in your workspace, someone’s going to ask you to create a PowerPoint for them. And if your experience is anything like mine, your coworker is going to ask you to put A LOT of text on each slide. Like so much text that nineteenth century Russian novelists would be intimidated.

There’s a serious disconnect between what people WANT to see on the screen when they’re listening to a presentation and what they, in turn, SHOW people when it’s their turn at the podium. Everyone seems to nod their head in steadfast agreement when I talk about how much I hate dense, wordy PowerPoint slides. But then they turn around and create the same sorts of slides themselves. (Or, as the young, tech-savvy person in my workspace, they ask me to do it.)

It’s time to fight back. The next time someone asks you to create a PowerPoint presentation for them, ignore what they tell you and follow these rules instead. While it may get you in hot water initially, the universe will ultimately reward you. I promise.

Rule #1: THESE ARE NOT YOUR PRESENTATION NOTES

Seriously. This one kills me. If you need notes during your presentation (and, sure, most presenters do) then try HOLDING THE NOTES IN YOUR HANDS. Projecting the points you want to cover on a big screen is OVERKILL. And it has the not-so-lovely side effect of ensuring that everyone has read ahead of what you’re planning to say before you’ve even said. Presenters NEED to remember that, unless your audience is a room full of infants or hamsters, people can READ faster than you can talk.

And, no, having each bullet appear sequentially as you talk about each one is not an effective way around this problem. Really.

Rule #2: YOUR POWERPOINT IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE YOU

While it may be tempting to be really comprehensive with your slides, tying everything you want to say into a nice little package that can be sent as a ppt file via email to anyone who asks, this kind of thinking ALWAYS leads to a bad presentation. There is absolutely no way you can effectively lay out everything you want to talk about in a presentation on PowerPoint slides and still keep your audience entertained.

When in doubt, remember this: You are NOT presenting a PowerPoint presentation to an audience. You are presenting YOUR IDEAS to an audience. The PowerPoint is a mere enhancement.

Rule #3: LEARN THE PROGRAM BEFORE YOU DIVE IN

PowerPoint is not a complicated program, but that doesn’t mean you should just dive in and start creating your presentation without doing a little bit of learning first. Here’s a little test to let you know if you’re ready: Do you know what a Master Slide is and how to use it? If not, then learn THAT before you start. The Gen Y employee you get to help you later on will thank you for it.

Also, Times New Roman? No. Comic Sans? Double No. (Even if it is such a ‘fun font!’) Animation? Triple No. Your title zooming across the screen one-letter-at-a-time accompanied by machine gun noises? No No No No No.

Rule #4: REMEMBER THAT POWERPOINT IS VISUAL

As often as I’m annoyed by what people include in their PowerPoint presentations (see #1), I’m also generally dismayed at the stuff people leave out. PowerPoint is at its best when it’s used for visual information. So if you’re talking about the increase in sales over the last quarter, don’t just list those numbers in a table — make a chart! Trying to create a feeling of collaboration or innovation? A picture works wonders. These should be the bread and butter of your slides — if there isn’t any way to convey what you’re talking about visually, then you likely don’t need a slide for it.

And, as stupid as it sounds, don’t forget the obvious stuff. Include a slide with your name on it. People will appreciate it not only because it helps them remember, but also because it lets them know the proper spelling. Ditto your phone number and e-mail. And any sources, whether they be books, URLs, movies, or whatever, should be shown on screen, so people can be sure to record them accurately if they want to look them up later.

Rule #5: CONSIDER THAT YOU MAY NOT NEED A POWERPOINT

In a lot of circumstances, PowerPoint can serve as an effective visual aid during your presentation. But there is no rule that says EVERY presentation need its own PowerPoint presentation. In fact, some presenters might find themselves stronger without it. If you find yourself thinking more about the upcoming slide than you are the core idea you want to convey to your audience, removing the PowerPoint may prove beneficial to both you and your audience.

After all, Lincoln never had PowerPoint, and the Gettysburg Address still turned out okay. (With PowerPoint, it might have turned out like this)

Photo by fling93. Licensed under Creative Commons.

I don’t take notes during meetings at work. I’ve taken some flack for this in the past, as usually I am the ONLY person in the room not taking notes. I also never really took notes during school classes. Not even in university. I’ll jot down REALLY important items (phone numbers, deadline dates, really critical items) but, by and large, when you look over at me during a meeting, I’m not going to be writing anything down.

I’ve always thought of myself as a mental note taker.

But this post over at Penelope Trunk’s blog has got me questioning this practice. According to Penelope, mental note taking is bad practice.

I tell Ryan Paugh that mental notes is a joke. No one takes a mental note taker seriously. It looks like they don’t care. “Even if you’re a genius,” I tell him, “you have to take notes to show you are engaged.”

It used to be that note taking was for secretaries. When hotshots didn’t type, hotshots didn’t take notes. But now we know that people actually learn more when they write as they listen, and people learn more when they translate what they are hearing into their own idea nuggets, so it makes sense that writing notes is a hot-shot job now. Everyone takes notes.

As much as I hate to admit it, this does make sense. My rationale for not taking notes has always been that, even when I do take notes, I never end up looking at them again anyway. I have no organizational system for my notes. I have no organizational systems in general.

I just assume I’ll be able to remember it all. And, up until now, that hasn’t really been a problem. But I guess the question I need to ask myself is this: will that ALWAYS be the case?

I tend to tout the virtues of Gen Y a lot, but I think, in this case, I’ve come across something that truly is a flaw. While it IS possible to be TOO organized — and I’d definitely argue that a lot of ‘traditional’ paper-based organizational systems are a waste of time (and space!) — Gen Y’s hubris when it comes to things like “mental note taking” is a real flaw.

There’s a good post and discussion over at Tamara J Erickson’s blog.

The critics are concerned that the culture of praise Ys experienced as a child will reach deeply into the adult world, suggesting that they feel insecure if they’re not regularly complimented. Bosses are being made to feel the need to lavish praise on young adults with the threat that they will wither under an unfamiliar compliment deficit.

I’ve written about the narcissism issue before but it’s one that keeps popping up. It seems like a lot of employers and managers are seeing their new Gen Y employees constant desire for feedback as a narcissistic trait. I certainly grant that Gen Y requires a lot of attention from their bosses and managers, but I’m not sure how that can fairly be called narcissistic.

Building the perfect résumé

Look, Gen Y has been résumé building since we were nine years old. And just because we’ve found employment in our twenties doesn’t mean we’re looking to stop. Past generations were content to wait and let the corporate structure for advancement carry them forward, but Gen Y, while they’re working for you currently, hasn’t stopped thinking about their next job. And probably the one after that. And the one after that, too.

We want constant feedback because we want to know if what we’re doing is making any difference to that résumé. The motivation isn’t “I want to know I am valuable!” it’s “I want to know that this job I’m doing is valuable to ME going forward.” Because if it’s not? We’re looking for the door.

John Gruber linked to this interview with David Allen a while back. I’m just getting to reading it now. Allen is the mind behind GTD (or “Getting Things Done”), which is something I don’t know much about. (I’m interested, though. I plan to pick up the book.)

Anyway, in the interview Allen says this:

One of the problems that’s endemic with the younger generation people who have grown up with computers and with email they make the assumption that email is a fine medium for communicating anything and everything.

Which, for some reason, provoked a really strong emotional reaction in me as I read it. “He’s wrong!” I thought, imaginary daggers in my eyes. “He’s wrong wrong wrong.”

Thankfully, commenter Joost laid it down before I had to:

Please. One of the problems that’s endemic with the older generation is that they make the assumption that email is only appropriate for communicating a small narrowly defined subset of human communication.

Why do we have e-mail?

When I first started work, I’d write long, detail-heavy e-mails to my co-workers. My rationale was that it was better to cover all the bases all at once than risk the finer points being missed. My e-mails were (at least in my opinion) well-written, friendly and easy to understand.

Unfortunately, nobody read them.

A lot of my issue was just that I overestimated the amount of time people have for reading e-mail. A lot of older people regard it primarily as a nuisance, and like to spend as little time reading (skimming, really) e-mail as possible. And that’s okay. That much makes sense to me.

What NEVER made sense to me was the people who picked up the phone or waited until they saw me to communicate a message. Or, instead of sending a response, booked a meeting to discuss what I had e-mailed. If that’s how work is going to get done, I thought, why even HAVE e-mail?

Trusting technology

One of the really impressive things Generation Y does is communicate widespread messages effortlessly. If you’ve ever watched an event come together on facebook (or through another evite app) you know what I’m talking about. It’s simple: five minutes of work and a few clicks can result in a packed house the next night.

We trust that the app — the technology — is going to work. It’s going to effectively communicate the message.

The older generation seems to have trouble with this.

Image by m-c. Licensed under Creative Commons

I recently came across a great post at Ian Selvarajah’s blog on the correlation between Generation Y and the management theory called ‘boreout’.

You would think that the “best of the best” would be highly productive and contributing a lot to their organizations right? Wrong. Oddly enough, despite several of us getting very good jobs with prestigious firms in a variety of industries and decent pay, many are unhappy with our jobs, primarily because we’re bored!

I had never heard of ‘Boreout’ before (though it must be a real thing — it has a wikipedia entry) but it’s certainly a familiar concept. It’s the opposite of ‘burnout’, which is when an employee has too much challenging work on his or her plate. With ‘boreout’, the employee has too little.

The truth about most of us Gen Yers who work office jobs is that we often ARE bored. Employers and managers tend to blame the internet (and namely facebook these days) as a sapper of productivity in office environments, but I think that’s putting the cart before the horse. We don’t forsake work to surf, we surf because we’re bored with work. And sometimes because we don’t even have any work to do.

Causes? I can think of a couple.

‘Climbing the Ladder’ Syndrome

The first is the old career-centric dynamic, where big companies hired people (often with WAY less education and experience than entry-level employees have now) and ‘grew’ them inside the company. It’s the old story about starting in the mailroom and working your way up to the corner office. Gen Y knows this is BS, though, and those of us (especially the top of the class types) starting out are going to get bored fast if we’re sitting around doing data entry while other people do the real meaty work.

Gen Y is not patient. Expecting them to ‘wait their turn’ is going to absolutely lead to hardcore burnout.

Exceeding ‘realistic’ time expectations

The second cause may be more anecdotal, but I thought I’d throw it out there and see what sort of response it gets. See if this scenario is familiar:

You’re starting at a new job and are given a few tasks to get your feet wet. They expect that these tasks will take you a week to complete. You finish in two days. So, being a good employee, you report that you’re done to your manager and ask for more tasks. But the cycle continues, as you continuously finish tasks days before you’re expected to. Eventually, the act of continuously having to come up with new things for you to do seems to start to annoy your boss, who is likely burned out with their own work.

The result? You start to wait. Give yourself a buffer. Finish a task, surf for an hour, hang out at the watercooler, and then see if there’s anything else you need to be doing. Short-term it can actually feel like a nice respite from having to do work all day long. Long-term it can easily manifest itself as the dreaded boreout.

The beginnings of a solution

The real solution to both issues is likely exceedingly complicated, requiring a whole new shift in management thinking. But to simplify it, I’d say it just comes down to this: encourage your young employees to be self-directed. Give them tasks, set deadlines, and if they exceed them, then encourage them to focus on more educational endeavors in their newfound ‘free’ time: learn a new computer program, start a company blog, study a new programming language or research new design trends. Google’s 20 percent time is a good model of self-directedness because not only has it led to a lot of awesome google products but it also means that managers don’t have to manage so much.

Gen Y is complicated, requiring you to be hands-off in some ways and hands-on in others, but the self-directedness is at the core of our attitude toward work. Some might characterize it as impatience, but it more has to do with just wanting to get things done without others standing in the way.

Photo by phoenixdailyphoto. Licensed under Creative Commons

This blog post got me thinking about something that’s been around, according to wikipedia at least, since 1975: the paperless office.

Generation Y has, by and large, earned their digital stripes. We’re technology savvy and, coincidentally, we’re also environmentally conscious. Add those two together and you get a generation of employees that might finally push to make the paperless office a reality.

That said, my two years of experience in the workplace have shown me that there are still a number of barriers to the paperless office that have absolutely nothing to do with the readiness of the technology. Unfortunately — or, I guess, fortunately, if you’re one of those people who loves their printer — paper is pretty culturally and politically ingrained into office life.

Here’s a list of a just a few of barriers I’ve noticed standing in the way of a paperless utopia.
Read more »

Last week’s Entertainment Weekly has a big article on the ratings for this year’s Oscars ceremony, which were the lowest they’ve ever been. I can’t find the exact article on EW’s website, but here’s one that covers roughly the same ground.

There’s a lot of stupid conclusions people are making about why less people are watching the Oscars. For example:

Some of these movies are just too difficult for a mass audience, frankly. And if we have moved into an era where there’s this dichotomy between big popular studio movies and smaller pictures for more specialized audiences, we may just have to get used to smaller audiences [for the Oscar telecast.]

I don’t buy it. Most people have never tuned into the Oscars to watch their favourite movies win awards, rooting for the ones they feel close to like they would their favourite football team. Instead, they’ve traditionally tuned in because it’s a spectacle: a long, star-studded, gala event with jokes, dancing, montages, shadow puppets, etc.

And the reason the ratings are declining is, I’d argue, due to a very Gen Y shift from passive viewing to active on-demand acquisition of content.

The thing about this year’s Oscar’s ceremony is that, even if I missed the entire show, I can still easy view all the best moments. As early as the next morning, youtube was full of them. I can spend a half hour, see all the best stuff, and not feel like I wasted four hours of a Sunday night sitting through the award for Sound Editing.

It’s a smarter way of accessing entertainment, and the Y generation is doing it in incredible numbers. From downloading a show via iTunes to skip commercials, to using Tivo to record events and allow us to skip around, the motivation is to be entertained on our terms.

This is an attitude that will extend to your workplace, too. Your Gen Y employees will be likely to grumble about that all-day meeting you have planned: why can’t you just e-mail out some notes that they can view on their own time? Why sit in a room together and create that proposal document when it can be broken up and tackled in smaller, more valuable pieces?

Asking Generation Y to sit in one place for a long time will always be a challenge, and it doesn’t have (that much) to do with shorter attention spans and trumped up ADD diagnoses. Instead, it’s more a quest of defiance of tradition, always asking this question: why do it that way when we can do it this way, faster, and get the same result?

Photo by NMCIL ortiz domney. Licensed under Creative Commons