What could be more fitting for a Canada Day / Independence Day post, than a plea for you to take the weekend off?

That’s right: it’s your friendly neighborhood slacker trying to spread the message of slacktivism throughout the world.

But let’s get this whole slacker thing straight: I’m a slacker as much for your benefit, as I am for my own. How does that work you ask? Read on…

We all know people that are over-committed. Have you noticed that it’s a chronic state for many of them? It’s the classic case of “if you want something done, ask a busy person.” Busy people trend toward busier not less busy, it’s pretty much a fact of life.

The problem is: it can often lead into a downward spiral — a permanent state of busy and over-committed that self-perpetuates. I’m hear to tell you that working weekends is not the answer.

“What’s the big deal about working weekends?” you ask. The downsides are considerable, I assure you:

• Neglecting more important “work”: For example, pursuing interests outside of what you get paid for, or charge clients for. It’s common knowledge that lateral thinking capacity is increased when a person has a wider set of experiences to draw from. Advice: Expand your mind. Take a course in something new, join a Hackerspace and make something, or push yourself to learn a new language. It’s “work,” yes; but it’s the most important kind.

• Not giving yourself time to repair: it’s also well known that the human body follows cycles. If those cycles are ignored, not only does productivity decrease — especially creative problem solving skills — but also the body’s ability to repair itself, and defend itself from illness. Taking regular breaks, including a nice long one at the end of the work week, is critical toward ensuring better performance over the long run. You’ll be more focused when you’re working, and less likely to miss work because you’re sick.

• Starting the week tired: The one side effect of working on weekends (yes, I’ve done it, as much as I hate to admit it) that I feel most immediately & significantly is a lack of excitement on Monday morning. The work week is a sprint for me — it’s a personal contest to see how efficiently I can use my time, and how productive I can be (within the bounds of being a slacker, of course). Starting out tired on Monday almost inevitably leads to a less productive week, which — in turn — can trigger that impulse to work on the weekend. You see? It’s a negative feedback loop! And one that you should fight to get out of.

• Setting a bad example Most importantly, working weekends sets a bad example for your staff and peers. Sending work-related e-mails on Saturday or Sunday to co-workers says “Hey, I’m over-committed and trying to catch-up,” and “I’m expecting you to work weekends too!” Even if neither are the message you intended, that’s the signal it sends. Advice: if you have to write them on Sunday to get them out of your head — so be it — just save them as drafts and send them Monday morning.

Remember: Doing amazing work in the world usually comes from doing amazing work in your life first. And there’s no better way to start doing amazing work in your life than to give yourself the time to do it.

Weekends are a great place to start. So start by taking this weekend off.

Happy Canada Day & Independence Day weekend. :)

— The Slacker-in-Chief

At one of the spectrum you have the concept of the 4-hour work week, and at the other you have the five-day work week. Both are myths, IMHO.

Today, I want to rant about the latter: The myth of the five-day work week.

Some years ago I delivered a presentation titled “Time Management for the Productivity Challenged” at the first Social Tech Training in Toronto.

You could hear a gasp in the packed room of professional campaigners and social-change activists — people prone to eighty-hour work weeks and tireless commitment — when I proposed that most of us only have thirty or forty summers left to experience.

Life can seem long, until you contrast it with something as fleeting as events that only happen an easily conceivable number of times, like summers, or vacations, or the remaining birthdays of family members.

Dire? Maybe. True? Absolutely.

The point of my talk was not to scare people into quitting work and living out their remaining summers following their wildest dreams (though, I’d never argue that you shouldn’t do that if you can!).

My point was to re-frame how we need to work: being clear about what work gives to us — meaning, purpose, etc. — and proposing that we need to give back to that work to make it sustainable. Giving back, however, is not keeping your ass in the chair eighty-plus hours a week (or, I would argue, even forty hours a week).

I mixing a couple themes together here, so this is probably a bit murky, but here’s my point:

• Working five days a week does not equal being productive five days a week. It’s commonly understood (lots of reports on the InterWebs if you want to search) that workers who work the standard 9-5 deliver less than 40% actual productivity. Microsoft looked at this in the 80s, many have researched it since.

• Add to that the reality that most 9-5 workers have no ability to manage their time because they’re completely unaware of how little of it they actually have. For example, do this exercise: take the number of hours you estimate that you ‘worked’ last week, now subtract the time you spent doing personal things (phone calls, lunch, breaks, errands, etc.), and subtract the time you spent in meetings and conversations with colleagues, and subtract the time you spent on e-mail — now subtract an estimate of your ‘unproductive time’ (day dreaming, Web surfing, making to-do lists, improving your project management process, etc.). What do you have left? Was it what you thought? How do you manage your commitments when you think you have forty hours to work with, and — in actuality — you have some number (often dramatically) less than that?

• Next, it’s generally agreed that breakthrough ideas are only possible when you have enough time away from the problem for your brain to subconsciously work on it. If you’re banging your head against the monitor every day, it’s unlikely you’re going to give yourself the fertile ground you need to find the best solution to the problem.

• Then there’s the whole school of thought that thinks that too much focus / too narrow scope can limit a worker’s ability to think outside the box. For example, if you’re a programmer, most problems look like programming problems that need to be solved with better software. Often, that’s not the case, nor the best solution. Working on a variety of problems, in a variety of roles, can often provide the mix of perspectives necessary to see the problem from many different angles, and propose cross-cutting solutions.

After a decade and a half of consulting — of billing by the hour, and ensuring that those hours are the most focused and high-value that I can deliver — I’m convinced that very, very few people can be ‘in the flow)’ and delivering high-value productivity for more than 18 - 24 hours a week.

That’s why the five-day work week is a myth: outside of the factory or sweatshop, I believe that it is one of the most wasteful arrangements of the workforce that has ever been perpetuated.

Prove me wrong. :)

30-second summary:

• Apple is forcing an upgrade to their new MobileMe calendar on May 5, 2011
• The new MobileMe calendars are not CalDav compatible and break calendar synchronization for some third-party applications like Daylite CRM
• I use Daylite with MobileMe calendar syncing & needed a solution before May 5th
• After some investigation & experimentation, I implemented to Spanning Sync 3 (referral link) to replace MobileMe
• Now, thanks to Spanning Sync, I can continue to use Daylite and also enjoy Google calendar and contacts syncing (that syncs to both my Android phone and iPad)

If you want the nitty-gritty, read on...

Back in February, I got an e-mail from Apple's MobileMe department informing me that I would need to upgrade to the new MobileMe calendar by May 5th. The new calendar promised "calendar sharing with friends and family," a "beautiful new Web application," and "event invitations with 1-click RSVP" -- what could be better, right?

Sadly, MobileMe's new calendar is a bust, and has left many people like me looking for other solutions to keep our various calendars in sync. Specifically, I used MobileMe as a hub for calendar data, various applications would create calendar events and MobileMe would keep those events in sync across my Macs, iOS devices, and also provided a Web-based calendar. The new calendar breaks this functionality for third-party applications -- coming from Apple, this is no big surprise.

Since 2005, I've been using Daylite to keep my life organized. You know: appointments, contact information, projects and to-do lists, and so on. Back then, it was pretty much the only game in town for Outlook-like functionality on a Mac, i.e., something that integrated with my e-mail-centric workflow.

I've paid for Daylite maybe two or three times over the years -- the initial purchase, the mail integration plug-in, and maybe one upgrade -- so, overall, I'm pretty happy with the cost-benefit analysis. However, the company that makes Daylite (Marketcirle) is moving toward a software rental business model -- a model that I'm not super-fond of -- and that means it's probably time to think about moving on.

Alas, I've not had the time to find a replacement yet, so the looming date of May 5th to migrate from MobileMe was starting to feel ominous.

There was a feisty thread over on the Marketcircle forums about the issue. Long story short, the choices appeared to be: migrate to a Daylite-only solution for syncing (requiring a hefty investment in software licenses and ongoing annual fees), or implement a third-party sync solution like BusyMac or Spanning Sync.

I had some free time this weekend and decided not to delay the inevitable. Conclusion: after a decent amount of reading and experimenting, I migrated to Spanning Sync 3 (referral link).

So, basically, my system works like so:

• I'm still using Daylite on my main laptop (where I create most appointments and contacts) * Daylite synchronizes to my local iCal and Address Book
• Spanning Sync now synchronizes appointments and contacts to Google
• My Google Nexus One (Android) phone syncs with Google calendar and contacts
• My iPad also syncs with Google calendar and contacts using the Exchange sync option 
• Spanning sync also runs on my Dell Mini 10v "Hackintosh" to keep iCal and Address Book synced over there too

So, after a couple hours of mucking about, I've now got the same functionality that I had before, plus I can see and edit my appointments & contacts on my Android phone and share calendars with other people -- both are big bonuses. More than that, now that I'm migrated to Google calendar and contacts, I feel like I'm one step less dependent on Daylite.

Maybe one of these days I'll be able to migrate completely. (If you have suggestions, please let me know. Extra points if it runs on Linux too.)

UPDATE: I haven't tried it, but the folks at Eltima e-mailed me after I wrote this post about their SyncMate software. Looks interesting if you have a whole whack of devices to sync, and want to sync more than just calendars and contacts.