A couple of months back, my girlfriend and I hired someone to come clean our apartment. We went through a service, of which there are a zillion in this city. After setting things up, getting a key made, and working out a schedule, it’s been pretty much a set-it-and-forget-it kind of thing. Every other Monday, we leave our house and, when we return in the evening, it’s much much cleaner than it was before.

I’ve gotten some pretty extreme reactions from people I’ve told about this arrangement. Most just think it’s funny — something Matt has to do because Matt’s messy. Others understand, usually because they had a cleaning service come to their house growing up. Some people, though, react almost with a hint of disgust — like I’m doing something wrong by doing things that way.

I can’t draw any kind of clear generational lines on the issue: reactions were diverse amongst young and old alike. But what I can do is give you my perspective in the form of some advice: there is nothing wrong with outsourcing the parts of your own life that you don’t have time for, dislike or outright dread. There’s nothing noble about spending your time doing something you either are no good at or dislike.

We live in a time where households are increasingly dual-income, which means both partners are busy. And the line between work and home is blurring, though not necessarily in a bad way. Due to increases in technology and direct access to revenue streams, online and off, more and more people are finding that the old “time is money” adage now applies directly to them.

If you’re a writer, or a blogger, or a designer, or any kind of freelancer, is spending four hours in the evening cleaning your house really a cost-effective exercise? Or is there a more efficient way to do it? And even if you’re not a freelancer type, you too should weigh the benefits in terms of your work/life landscape: maybe it’d be better for you if you spent that time enjoying a dinner with friends who you never get to see.

This doesn’t just apply to house cleaning. We live in an era where many facets of your day-to-day life can be outsourced. Hate laundry? Set up a pick-up/drop-off service. Always scrambling to find time to go to the grocery store? Consider an online grocery delivery service. Hate shopping for Christmas gifts? Consider a concierge. Hell, some people have even gone as far as to outsource their daily email, as Tim Ferriss of Four Hour Work Week has done:

1) I have multiple e-mail addresses for specific types of e-mail (blog readers vs. media vs. friends/family, etc.). tim@… is the default I give to new acquaintances, which goes to my assistant.

2) 99% of e-mail falls into predetermined categories of inquiries with set questions or responses (my “rules” document is at the bottom of this post — feel free to steal, adapt, and use). My assistant(s) checks and clears the inbox at 11am and 3pm PST.

3) For the 1% of e-mail that might require my input for next actions, I have a once-daily phone call of 4-10 minutes at 4pm PST with my assistant.

The point is not to assume everyone can just throw money at stuff like this and live a life of luxury, but just to consider not doing something you dread. These services are frequently far more affordable than people assume, and if the net benefit to your life is evident, then why question them?

There’s nothing noble about sacrificing for the sake of sacrificing. If there’s part of your life that you loathe managing yourself, look at the alternatives. It may make a world of difference.

Photo by derek*b. Licensed under Creative Commons

Just an idle thought to keep this site going this week: do people who exhibit so-called “workaholic” tendencies inevitably end up out of touch with the the latest goings-on?

I think they do. I don’t see a way around it.

One of the first things people sacrifice when they get overwhelmingly busy is their intellectual curiosity and inventiveness. When you’re stressed, you stop learning, and just start relying on the things you already know — the old chestnuts that have worked in the past and will, presumably, continue to work.

Further, this kind of work environment kills any kind of cultural connection. And I don’t just mean that in the “let’s go look at paintings or listen to beat poetry” sense. I’m speaking more broadly: of tech culture, of greater trends and shifts, of people and how they think and what they do.

It may not seem like much when your overworked co-worker tells you they haven’t seen a movie in years, haven’t finished that book they started five years ago or that their RSS reader has over 40,000 unread items in it, going back months, but these things don’t just happen in a vaccuum. Any employee that far removed from the world at large is, at best, going to be operating at a diminished capacity for creativity.

It’s an odd situation we find ourselves in with work culture, because while we’re finally starting to understand on a macro level that people working themselves to death isn’t a very good thing, we still tend to see honour in burning the midnight oil (or the candle at both ends, or whatever you happen to be setting afire) to get work done.

We need to get away from that. It’s not a good idea in mental or physical health terms, and it’s not a good idea in the knowledge economy, because working all the time impedes knowledge.

Take a break. Read a book. Go to the movies. Learn something. It’s important.

Photo by truthlying. Licensed under Creative Commons

Weird editorial in the Financial Times UK today from Michael Skapinker, which is a neat name. He titles it A dose of austerity for a pampered generation, and is sort of all over the map.

Look, he starts here:

This recession has already hurt people such as over-mortgaged home owners and bank staff. But employers and headhunters predict a real shock for one group: those in their 20s and early 30s who have never experienced an economic downturn before.

Then hits us with this old chestnut:

For the baby boomers’ children, mass unemployment will be something new. The shock will be all the greater because the best educated of them have had it their own way ever since they entered the workplace.

Doom! Gloom! We’re so screwed. If only Generation Y hadn’t been so pampered and demanding. If only we were more like the boomers.

But wait — maybe we’re actually okay? Skapinker continues:

In one sense, today’s younger generation are better prepared for economic hard times than their parents or grandparents: they were not expecting jobs for life.

Nor did they ever think they would have defined benefit pensions, calculated as a proportion of salary at retirement. (One young worker was astonished when I explained the idea to her.)

However pampered Generation Y may have been, switching jobs and reconsidering careers are second nature to them.

It’s always nice when an author refutes his own headline. It just sort of wraps everything up nicely, doesn’t it?

I’ve written about this already. It’s still way too early to really speculate on how the economic downturn will affect Gen Y’s employment prospects. My personal feeling is that if it does hurt them, it’ll be a very short-term period of pain, and then it will end. But regardless: I think claims that Gen Y needs to adjust their attitudes in light of the recession are completely insane.

Here’s why: Generation Y hasn’t demanded greater work/life balance and so-called perks (Skapinker makes reference to Gen Y getting time off work to “train for the triathlon”) solely because they can. We’re not holding jobs ransom, hoping to get a sweet flex-time schedule out of the deal. We ask for these things because we feel that they’re important. They’re not frivolous or expendable and, most importantly at all, they don’t actually affect the quality or amount of work we get done.

Seriously, if your employee can do great work, get things done on time, and also takes two extra hours every morning to train for the triathlon, what does it matter?

Am I missing some logic here? Have I just not taken my dose of austerity yet? Should I really take austerity on an empty stomach?

Photo by Pulpolux !!!. Licensed under Creative Commons.

ITWorldCanada.com has the scoop on a survey of 27,000 Canadian university students, the results of which are pretty interesting:

The study found that two of the top five places to work were tech companies: Google and Apple. According to DECODE partner Eric Meerkamper, “The brands that were chosen are considered to be authentic and innovate; part of some new and important values emerging in the workplace. All of these organizations are places that resonate as being stable and secure. This is an important variable considering the substantial debt load many students will carry upon graduation given rising tuition costs.”

You could essentially distill this down to “people want to work somewhere cool.” And a lot of what’s cool is admittedly perception more than it is reality. Is that fair? Not particularly. But I’d argue that’s almost unavoidable. Think about this question, and answer honestly — would you rather work at Exxon Mobil or Google? Deloitte or Apple? Ernst & Young or Nintendo?

People tend to gravitate towards the younger, hipper companies, even if there’s really not a huge difference in individual experience at the entry-level. And what makes these companies seem “young” and “hip” are actually small things, which don’t have to impact your bottom line. In fact, employers can make their businesses instantly more Y-friendly through just a few small changes to their corporate culture.

Here’s five to get you started:

Read more »

One of the more unifying traits of Generation Y is their desire to do important work that has meaning. For those that can afford it, this often manifests itself as volunteer, not-for-profit or NGO¹ work, or even kind-of-questionable things like voluntourism.

Studies continuously show that we’d rather feel like we’re contributing something or building our skills than we would just sit around, twiddling our thumbs, collecting a salary while waiting for those higher on the ladder to either retire or get high by a cement truck. Even if that salary is large, we’re often still not content: only about 20% of the interviewees stated that salary levels were “very important” to them.

Is this a bad trait? Not really. The same studies also show that Gen Y employees are completely willing to work their asses off if the right opportunity comes their way. It’s only if we feel stuck in some soulless, static position that we start to show off some of that now-infamous Generation Y laziness.

Where things DO become problematic, though, is that I think we often don’t give our employers a chance. We can be impatient, and we can be impulsive. If we don’t feel immediately like we’re being valued in a position, we’re liable to job hop, skipping from one employer to the next in the hopes of finding the position that does give us meaning right away.

The reality is that most employers are not going to thrust their new employees into important and meaningful work from day one. And their reasons for not doing so are actually pretty solid. First, because it can be business suicide to give something that could seriously impact your company’s bottom line to a untested newbie. Second, because they’ve likely been burned before by people leaving less than a year into the job.

You can see the Catch-22, can’t you? It’s that big, obvious thing heading straight at us. Young people don’t want to wait around for meaning, so they leave. Employers don’t want to give their new people big projects, because new people are notorious for leaving after a few months on the job.

It has all the qualities of a vicious cycle, and indeed, I’ve heard anecdotal reports of people bouncing around, from entry-level position to entry-level position. These are often talented, well-prepared, skilled individuals, but after eight months of doing nothing but shuffling paper around and watching older, more seasoned employees juggle all sorts of meaningful projects, they bail out.

I think this is one situation where the younger people need to adjust more than the employers do. Gen Y needs to remember that it can’t be so idealistic to think that they can just slide into a high-paying, high-responsibility position² and that, in this case especially, patience is a virtue.

However, employers need to understand that this attitude is commonplace, and adjust for it. Even just a little communication goes a long way here. Give constant feedback, let your young employees know where you see them going in the organization. The absolute worst thing you do is just leave them behind their desk, convinced that all they’re ever going to do is staple, copy and add formulas to your spreadsheets.

In sum: patience and communications. They just might be the fundamental building blocks of the effective intergenerational office.

Photo by gilberts. Licensed under Creative Commons

1. NGO is a really stupid, term, by the way. Here are a list of literal non-governmental organizations: Wal-Mart, McDonalds, The Pittsburgh Steelers, Sony, Ben & Jerry’s. But I digress. [↩]
2. Yes, this is true even if you went to Grad School. I know they might have tried to convince you otherwise. [↩]