Posts

Showing posts from August, 2013

Listening is Hard

Image
Listening is hard. At least that's my experience and there's lots of research that correlates with my experience. I recently heard or read somewhere that we can only listen for 7 seconds without interrupting the speaker or having our thoughts drift off. I couldn't find where I read or heard this. Maybe some podcast? Maybe I forgot because I was already thinking about this blogpost before I finished listening  to the article... Anyway, I searched around a bit and found several posts that say we only listen 5-7 seconds and then start to think of something else or we start to think about interrupting. Another posts says it 18 or 23 seconds . Tom Peters says 18 seconds . And this post just doesn't know... In any case listening is extremely important. Seth Godin wrote a nice post about this . Listening is "not a passive act" and needs "purpose". And Luis Suarez wrote about "active listening" and points to a lovely video about listening

Welcome David!

Image
As I tweeted and G+-ed just a couple of days ago: my 3rd son was born on Sunday. His name is David John (Dutch: David Johannes). He's a healthy, big boy weighing 4386 gr and he's 56 cm long. I'm happy to say the delivery went well. There were some complications, but we're doing fine now. We're all enjoying little David and getting used to him. David's older brothers are extremely proud of him.

When new technologies become productive

Image
Wired is my favorite work-related magazine by far. I read all editions from cover to cover (almost). Recently Wired celebrated its 20th anniversary with a special edition . Reading through that edition is a fascinating trip through history. And it's only been 20 years! For their anniversary Wired also collected some of their most popular articles and bundled them into an ebook. One of the articles struck me. The article is titled:  The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 - 2020 and is written by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden. I'm a sucker for these kind of articles. But I found this one intriguing because it was written some time ago. I was curious how well they predicted what was going to happen in the time we are living in now. Of course they got things wrong, but many predictions are quite correct. Go ahead, read the article and see for yourself. But there's one part in this article that I wanted to share with you. It relates to all the posts that have bee

Neglecting my blog...

Remember me? I'm the guy who used to blog regularly here, but has been silent for some time. Man, what is going on? Happy to say I wasn't silent on Twitter and Google+ ... But I must say not blogging feels bad. For some time I was wondering if I was out of ideas to share. I know this is not the case. I have many draft blogposts waiting to be finalized for publication. Bu the main reason for not publishing them is time. I never put blogging in my schedule. I would just blog whenever I felt like it and had time to think and write. But my working (and private) life has changed lately. Not just in the number of projects I'm doing, but also juggling them in my head. I think that's the most important reason for not blogging. I need time and brain cycles to churn out posts. And it was not there or I didn't make sure it was there. Maybe I need to underschedule more? Anyway, I plan to blog more regularly. I'm simply inserting time to blog in my schedule and see if