100 Million Hours

Here's an interesting read about Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Ask yourself this, how much time are wasting watching TV and not making your dream a reality?

Monkey Management

I came across an awesome book for managers and entrepreneurs with small teams. It's called the One Minute Manager.

It will teach you a fantastic way to manage your time more effectively and deal with the pesky monkeys that plague your office. These monkeys are tasks that can be passed from one person to another. You may not notice them now, but when you come to understand what they are, you'll see them everywhere.

Think of this situation: a colleague walks into your office and tells you that there's a problem with the way the accounts are being done. You say you'll look into it. You have just accepted a monkey.

By following this book, you will hugely improve your team or business by better understanding how to assign tasks to people, and trusting them to use their initiative a little more. Before informing you of a problem they should learn to first of all think of a solution. Your response to a 'what do we do' situation should be: 'I don't know either, what do you think we should do.'

Look at that huge pile of paper, or that todo list. Are you doing your staff's work for them? How many tasks could you assign to other people, and how much extra time would that give you to deal with the tasks that you should be worrying about.

Your door should be open to your staff. Let them ask you questions, but tell them that you expect a solution (or at least an idea). You'll find you have more time to be a support to your staff, more time at home, and have a better, more efficient team.

Making Life Easier

Spare time grows ever smaller in this hectic world we live in. So, why waste time searching for a photographer, only to be met with uninformative, hard to navigate websites that all lead to the same mind-numbing ending: 'contact us for a quotation'.

I'm not a plumber, an electrician or a builder. I take portraits and I care about my customers.

In the interest of actually giving you the information you want, I will be redesigning the Lux Imaging website. It will be clearer, full of less text that might as well be replaced with 'bla bla bla', and packed with the information you want to know.

I will be moving to a package based system, so you don't need to worry about photographer time, prints, framing, delivery charges. It's all going to be included in the price.

The prints store will also actually be opening. It, too, will have lashings of this same no nonsense approach.

I'm excited, and it should be ready for public view by mid to late May.

Why is this happening? Well, I started Lux Imaging to address the backward nature of many photographers, and to be easier and more human than the high-street competition. And then I went and did exactly the same thing.

Just Do It

Sorry to coin that Nike phrase, but when it comes to an idea, just do it.

Don't plan in detail on pages and pages of paper you're only going to lose or jumble up.

Don't wait for the right moment.

Don't ask for someone's approval.

Don't lend anything from anybody.

Just Do It.

Fine, jot down on some paper a rough idea of what your dream is, and perhaps wait till there's a little cash in your pocket... but not that astronomical number you came up with. Just enough to advertise and start rolling out that product.

The old ways of starting up in business are fading out. There's a new kid in town. The Fortune 5,000,000.