Every time you make or receive a phone call that involves leaving or listening to a message, you’re wasting time. You can’t write as fast as people speak, so transcribing phone numbers, addresses, and other information from a voicemail message is tedious. When you have to leave a voicemail for someone, you’re forced to listen […]

After watching longtime colleagues get laid off during a painful downsizing, a friend of mine is putting together her résumé. She realized she could be next, and she wanted to be ready. “It’s scary,” she confided in me. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been on the hunt, interviewing, marketing my skills. Even though […]

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post on creative sabbaticals. It featured Stefan Sagmeister, a design studio owner who takes a year off from client work every seven years to boost his creativity. Readers reacted strongly, polarized into two camps: The “I wish!” folks, for whom a sabbatical seems like a distant dream, and […]

The first dot-com I worked at back in 2000 didn't survive, but one bit of office culture from that experience has stuck with me. In meetings, if a discussion...

In an early episode of the excellent TV series Mad Men, agency partner Roger Sterling walks into creative director Don Draper’s office to find Don gazing off into space. “I’ll never get used to the fact that most of the time it looks like you’re doing nothing,” Sterling quips. Sterling should take comfort in the […]

Google Wave is a new communication tool that the search giant bills as “what email would look like if it were invented today.” While the plan to modernize email is laudable and ambitious, Google Wave’s whiz-bang features can feel confusing and chaotic to new users. However, if regular people can make the leap that Wave […]

When you’re working offsite, whether at a client’s office or the local coffee shop, you’ve got to protect your laptop, whether from physical theft or the nosy cyber-snoop who’s trying to flip through your iTunes library (or worse). While your company has probably provided you with a VPN to securely connect to their internal network, […]

It never fails. You’re on a cross-country flight, laptop open on your tray table, digging deep into an important project when — your battery dies. As we become more dependent on mobile devices like laptops and smartphones, knowing how to extend the life of the battery that powers that device can mean the difference between […]

Even though SMS text messages are only 160 characters and cost your cellphone carrier virtually nothing to transmit, many mobile plans charge subscribers 5 to 20 cents per message. If you’re a text message fanatic — or you have a teenager in your house — you already know that these costs can really add up […]

Yowls of email withdrawal pain echoed throughout Twitter early last week, when Google’s popular webmail service Gmail went down for just under two hours. Every email system suffers from downtime on occasion, but Gmail’s outage made headlines because it hit so many users who were more than a little vocal about the downtime grinding their […]