Saturday
Sep192009
I want more mess and more time-wasting
Saturday, September 19, 2009 at 8:52AM If I were running a business I would want as many social tools as I could cram in and as many people using them as possible.
Why?
Because then I would get more mess and more time-wasting!
Why do I want more mess and more time wasting?
Because one man's mess is another man's gold dust and getting my time-wasters to show themselves allows me to manage them out of the business!
Reader Comments (4)
Euan
with you pretty much all the way - down to the last clause, which seems to make the last paragraph self-contradictory. Care to resolve the "gold-dust" and "time-waster" dichotomy?
Could it be that one man's "time-waster" is another person's "gold-miner?"
Again, I'm with you on letting people have more freedom, and then managing them appropriate rather than trying to herd cats into being productive by banning them from things.
But the way your post reads makes it sounds as if social tools are purely timewasting, which definitely isn't the case, and I know isn't your point!
I don't know .... I try to be provocative and people tell me to be reasonable .....
;-)
Actually, I think Euan is onto a very powerful analogy. For goodness sake, the image of dirty, smelly, grizzled men slumped over a stream, spending isolated hours panning for very small amounts of gold, over and over again as a means of personal fortune has quite a lot of potential clues to consider.
The important point is that whatever the tools, that the 'trail' be traceable. For example, if Web 2.0 tools were included, they leave a 'trail' in the E2.0 toolset. Why? 2 reasons. It avoids the need to duplicate efforts (I hated having to double-post stuff) and it gives individuals the feedback to manage their focus (work vs. personal).