Designers have a tricky job to perform. On the one hand, the products they create have to be efficient and ergonomic. They have to allow the consumer easy access to all of its functions and make use as intuitive as possible. On the other hand, they also  have to make the object look as attractive, as cool and as desirable as possible. Get it right and you might just end up with an iPod, a whole new genre of gadgets, a megajob with Apple and all the free iPhones you can eat. Get it wrong, and… well, you could find yourself included on a list of the worst design disasters.

The Wobbly Bridge

It cost £18.2m, was £2.2m over budget and when it opened on June 10, 2000, the Millennium Bridge over the Thames in London was two months behind schedule. That happens. Big construction projects often run late and cost more than expected, and the footbridge, with its low profile and unimpeded view of St. Paul’s Cathedral was pretty enough for people to overlook the cost. Created by architectural firm Arup, Foster and Partners and sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, the bridge was dubbed the “blade of light.”

Within two days of its opening though, the bridge had acquired a new name: The Wobbly Bridge.

On its first day, more than 90,000 people crossed the river, including many taking part in a charity walk. With as many as 2,000 people walking across at any one time, the suspension bridge began to sway. As it swayed, the walkers adjusted their steps, increasing the movement even more until it felt like walking along a rope. Two days later, the bridge was shut down.

Engineers later fixed the problem by retrofitting 89 dampers at an additional cost of £5m. The bridge re-opened in February 2002 — and was destroyed by Death Eaters in the opening sequence of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Microsoft Gets No Help from Clippit

Back in 1995, Microsoft had a killer idea. The company would create an interface that, for once, owed nothing to anything that Apple had done. The “social interface” program for Windows 3.1 would allow anyone to use a computer, even people who didn’t know how to use computers. By double-clicking on “Bob,” the interface would be changed to a picture of a living room. To find the program you wanted, you had to click a household item such as a sheet of paper for the word processor and a pile of envelopes to access email. If you got stuck, Rover the dog was on hand with helpful advice. The project was overseen by Melinda French, now better known as half of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and was killed before the release of Windows 98. Steve Ballmers described it as a time when Microsoft “decided that we have not succeeded and let’s stop.” PC World Magazine gave it seventh place on its list of the 25 worst products of all time.

You’d think that that would have been enough of a warning, but no. Still convinced that its customers were too daft to figure out how to use its products by themselves, Microsoft included the Office Assistant in its Office programs from 1997 to 2003. Whenever you started doing anything, a paperclip called Clippit would pop up and ask if you needed help. So annoying was Clippit and his friends, Merlin the Magician, F1 the robot, Links the cat and Rocky the dog that even Microsoft’s developers were said to have renamed Office Assistant TFC – “The Fucking Clown.” Sometimes it’s possible to overdesign a product.

Stick a Cell Phone to Your Head

And sometimes it’s possible to underdesign a product.

The Cell-Mate, which was actually shown at CES in 2009, calls itself a hands-free cell phone holder. It’s a headband. It looks  like a headband. It acts like a headband. And it appears about as cool and sexy as a headband. A metal headband with black disks.

Usually, simple is good, and there is something to be said for not looking like the kind of constantly connected android that walks around with a Bluetooth earpiece. But actually for the kind of problems that the Cell-Mate (and really, the person who came up with that name deserves a cellmate) solves, Bluetooth is fine. No one can see you looking silly when you’re doing the dishes or sitting in traffic – at least no one you care about. With so many cool and sexy ways to talk with your hands free, sticking a black disk on a couple of metal rods just isn’t going to cut it.

The Sinclair C5 — A Cold-Weather Convertible for the Suicidal

Fresh from his success at creating the first popular home computers, the ZX81 and the Spectrum, Sir Clive Sinclair looked to make another massive technological leap with the launch in 1985 of the C5. A battery-operated tricycle, the C5 followed at least some design rules. It looked cool, space-agey and sleek.

Unfortunately, that neat look hid a small problem. It was almost completely useless. The low ride led to worries that drivers wouldn’t be able to see it until they were driving over it. The motor was too puny to climb even the gentlest of hills. And January in England probably weren’t the best time and place to launch an open-top vehicle. Altogether fewer than 17,000 C5s were sold, making it about half as popular as the Segway.

Apple Newton Proves that Bad Ideas Can Only Go Down

Jonathan Ive might now be regarded as the master of all things design but even the best designers can make mistakes, especially when they’re just starting out. The Apple Newton was a good idea, a little ahead of its time. Launched in 1993 as an early personal organizer, the Newton showed the road ahead by ditching the buttons and using the screen as the main interface. Its  handwriting recognition software was supposed to make keyboards a thing of the past.

Unfortunately, the software wasn’t quite ready for primetime and repeated attempts at writing the same word made using the Newton felt a little like teaching a two-year old to read. Still, Ive did come on a bit… once Apple’s software developers had caught up.

Asked to promote an officer who had already shown talent, bravery and leadership, Napoleon, it is said, would always ask “Is he lucky?” That might have been a more reasonable question than it sounds. While luck is often seen as fickle and unreliable, the sense that some people are just plain luckier than others (and that some people have the touch of doom) might have solid grounding. It’s certainly possible to find people who appear to fit in one camp or another: how else to explain both Kaka’s $13 million annual salary from soccer club Real Madrid and his boy-band good looks? If luck isn’t evenly spread out then but delivered by the truckload to some people and snatched away from others, what can you do to ensure that as an officer of your business, your efforts are blessed by good fortune?

According to Dr. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at England’s University of Hertfordshire, and author of The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life: The Four Essential Principles, it is possible to take action that improves your chances. After tracking closely the behavior of 400 people who considered themselves either particularly lucky or cursed in everything they do, he produced four principles that characterize lucky types.

Pulp the Lemons

First, lucky people, he says, expect good luck. They’re optimistic and believe that everything will work out in the end. That confidence can help them to push through tough times, and might also mean that they pay less attention to the bad stuff and place a greater emphasis on the positives. It’s not really that they’re exceptionally lucky, they just regard the pot holes as exceptional and pay them little attention.

That sort of attitude also helps with the second principle. Lucky people turn bad luck into good. Instead of moping around and telling people how life’s got in for them, they actually take steps to turn things around. Being told to make lemonade out of life’s lemons might make you want to pulp the person giving you the advice, but “lucky” people, says Dr. Wiseman, actually do it. They recognize that things could have been worse, take control and move forward.

Those two principles though suggest that luck is as much about who you are as what you do. It’s about thinking you’re lucky rather than just being lucky. But Dr. Wiseman’s other two principles for winning luck offer much more practical strategies for business owners. Lucky people, he says, are willing to follow their hunches. They’re prepared to take risks, accept that losing is part of life and consider the consequences inconvenient rather than devastating. Because they’re willing to play more often, they win more often – and lucky types who listen to their gut and lose, rather than act only after long study, will then pull out their lemon juicers and think they’ve won.

To demonstrate that theory, Dr. Wiseman asked volunteers to count the number of pictures in a newspaper. A few pages in, the volunteers reached a half-page advertisement telling them that they could stop counting; the paper had 43 pictures. A few pages later, another ad placed next to a picture informed them that they could tell the examiner that they’ve seen the ad and claim a cash reward. The “unlucky” types missed it and kept counting.

Luck is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity

That shows what is probably the most important characteristic of lucky people: they maximize their opportunities. That’s vital and it suggests that there is a difference between chance and luck. Chance is random, evenly distributed and happens to everyone. Luck determines whether those chances turn out to be helpful or painful. It’s a redefinition of an older idea that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

That suggests that being lucky isn’t about buying a rabbit’s foot and keeping your fingers crossed. It’s about a combination of attitude and action. Being a lucky entrepreneur means adopting an upbeat, relaxed manner that allows you to see the bright side of any problem and remain calm enough to turn around a crisis.

It means laying the groundwork for action all the time because you never know when opportunity is going to knock. For an entrepreneur, that might involve building networks on Facebook and Twitter, and attending conferences, even when you have nothing to sell and little to promote. You never know who you might meet and what opportunities those networks could churn up.

It means having your elevator pitch ready and on the tip of your tongue because lucky people talk to the people they meet, win the chances to use those pitches and deliver them, while unlucky types ride the elevator quietly while staring at their shoes. Their attitudes increase the number of chances they come across and allow them to make the most of those chances when they turn up.

And also it means taking action instead of wondering what would happen if you did A instead of B while looking for more information about C.

Dr Wiseman describes one example of a single person who goes to a party hoping to find a date. An unlucky person would come away with no phone numbers and no date. A lucky person would come away equally dateless but with a bunch of new friends, some of whom might later develop into business partners, customers or suppliers.

To become a lucky entrepreneur then, you have to be able to see the bright side of life, be happy and outgoing, be prepared to take risks, network constantly and not sweat the small stuff. You have to believe that your venture will be successful and assume that when you take a step back, the next two steps forward will soon follow. With that sort of attitude, they always do. The result might not be a place at the officer’s table next to a short, French dictator but it might just give you a successful business – and friends who think you were just lucky.

Photography: Lee Bennett

Tech types have been predicting the rise of the paperless office for  years. When you can pack more information into the average laptop’s hard drive than you can squeeze into a room full of filing cabinets and when you can send documents backwards and forwards without ever licking an envelope, who needs to chop down trees and staple pages? Computer power will soon mark the end of ink and pulp, we’ve been promised… again and again. But could we see the end of the computer first? Just as the ability to squeeze increasing flexibility into laptops and now netbooks has reduced demand for desktops, could the growth of mobile phone technology mean the rise of the computerless company too?

Judging by sheer computing power alone, desktops should be safe. A typical Dell Inspiron desktop comes with a range of processors from Intel Celerons to Core 2 Quads, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage space, which certainly sounds impressive enough.

The iPhone is a Weakling

In comparison, even the latest iPhone 3GS looks like a seven-stone weakling. But for most users, even Dell’s most basic model is probably overkill. If all you’re planning to do is create spreadsheets, write emails and prepare documents, the lowest-end processor would be more than sufficient. And you’re only going to fill a terabyte of storage if you’re busy skipping round the corporate firewall to build your movie collection. Of course, you still have to pay for all of that extra power whether you use it or not.

That might explain why buyers are migrating to smaller, cheaper machines that pack a weaker punch but are still strong enough to do the job. According to iSuppli, a technology firm, sales of desktop PCs fell 18 percent in 2008. Sales of notebooks rose 12 percent in the same period.

But while even the smartest of smart phones might have relatively small brains, the iPhone didn’t revolutionize the mobile market with its muscle power. It was its interface that changed the way we compute. By making surfing the Web comfortable and easy, the iPhone’s true power doesn’t lie under its touchscreen but in the cloud. Who cares how much storage space you have when everything you need is available from one of the many online storage centers available – or even Google’s rumored GDrive? Does it matter if your iPhone only displays the last 50 messages when you can still log into Gmail and read everything you’ve received and sent over the last three years? And do you really need a program folder stuffed with bloatware when you can buy almost all of the programs? you need for just a handful of bucks – or even access the same functionalities free online

That became easier recently with the release for the iPhone first of QuickOffice and then of DataViz’s DocumentsToGo. Both were previously available for the Blackberry, Android and Palm but the iPhone’s bigger screen means that creating documents and spreadsheets is now more comfortable than ever. Although neither program offers the complete range of editing options available in Microsoft’s full-size Office suites – you can’t add comments, for example, or images to Word-type files — they both provide the most popular features used by most office workers. The completed documents can either be synced directly to a computer or – for non-computer types — emailed to a partner or client.

Can You Work without a Keyboard?

Best of all, the devices themselves fit in your pocket, weigh next to nothing and can be used and taken anywhere. You can now do your work while lying on the sofa or even squashed into economy class… with a food tray on your folding table. And it’s always with you. When was the last time you left home without your mobile?

Combine those basic office programs packed into a handheld device with Internet accessibility, email and the giant range of note-taking, organization and even entertainment apps, and it quickly becomes clear that there’s little a smartphone can’t do that your laptop can, except give you shoulder-ache.

But clearly, there are limitations. The iPhone still has no external keyboard, which means lots of tricky thumb-typing, and even the real buttons on a Blackberry or Windows Mobile device can feel pretty fiddly when you’re preparing a long report. Creative types who work with graphics might also find working from a mobile a challenge too far. The Zeptopad app does allow vector drawing – and even P2P sharing – while Color Expert helps artists and graphic designers capture inspiring  colors as they see them. Neither though offers anything like the flexibility designers need in Photoshop let alone a convenient, roomy place to store large format images. Attempting to put Adobe’s chief graphic product on the iPhone gives you something like this:

So while the rise of the personal computer was supposed to have done away with paper, in practice, things didn’t quite work out that way. Bored cubicle-dwellers are still able to three-point paper balls down the corridor. The Amazon is still being cleared to fill filing cabinets. And while screens sit on every office desktop, they’re often surrounded by piles of letters, documents and paper reports. The same is likely to remain true for the prospects of a computerless company. Mobile devices might be growing increasingly smart and incredibly flexible. They might now be able to offer many of the same functions and at the same speed that you could have found on a full-size computer just a few years ago. And their access to the cloud means that that potential is now limitless. But you wouldn’t want to use them all the time.

While you could now do all of your (non-graphic) work without ever touching a real keyboard, in practice, you probably won’t want to. Your smartphone won’t replace the desktop but it will probably sit on the desk, next to the laptop… and on top of your printed report.

Nothing focuses the mind faster than an impending delivery date. You’ve accepted the task, done the research and played with the procrastination. Now, with the deadline in sight, you actually have to finish the job and hand over the goods. The change is massive and sudden. Knowing that your reputation and possibly your job is on the line has an amazing effect. Suddenly, a task that looked impossible becomes achievable. YouTube and viral emails still appear tempting but you can block them out. Your productivity goes through the roof. Instead of staring at the wall or pacing around the room, you’re hacking at the keyboard as though it’s stuck to your fingers. Even if you miss the deadline a little, the period between recognizing the urgency and completing the job is one of unparalleled attention and diligence. If only you could work that way all the time. Sprinting like this over a full working life is just about impossible but you can take some of the lessons learned from the effect of a tight deadline and use them to raise your work rate every day.

First, it’s important to understand that deadlines aren’t uniform. They pack different characteristics and each characteristic has a different effect on motivation. The outcome for the worker himself, for example, is one important influence. A deadline for a design that could win you a promotion or land a larger and more satisfying project is likely to be met. A threat from the wife that she’ll throw out anything in the garage that hasn’t been put away by the end of Sunday can be fairly safely ignored. Deadlines aren’t just dates, they’re also carriers of personal punishment and reward.

Missed Deadlines Are Your Fault

They’re also vehicles for organizational punishment and reward, and that’s important too. When a failure to meet a deadline is going to have a knock-on effect throughout the business, delaying the next stage in a project or causing large-scale changes to the marketing plan, those results also affect motivation. Even if you can shift the blame onto tardy suppliers or poor information, the knowledge that others will suffer will influence your ability to knuckle down and finish on time.

And personal interest in the project helps too. When a task is interesting, exciting and fun to do, you’re more likely to do it on time and less likely to be pulled away by the lure of a new post on an interesting blog or the chance to chat with a friend.

All of these things make up the task’s importance—to you and to the organization. Other factors affecting a deadline’s ability to drive you to get things done include its level of difficulty, and the specificity of both the task and the deadline goal. You’re much more likely to miss a deadline when the job is difficult, when you’re uncertain about the requirements, and when you’re not clear about when the project actually has to be delivered. Does “the end of next week,” for example, mean 5pm on Friday or, if the project is just going to sit ignored on a computer all weekend, can it include a bit of Monday too?

So deadlines are most effective at increasing productivity when they include real consequences, when you know what needs to be done and when it needs to be done by, and when you enjoy the job. Few tasks pack all of those things but the more you can include, the better.

But these factors are difficult to control. You don’t want every job to be life or death. A task that looks clear can become fuzzy as you work your way through it. And while you might start a new task buzzing with excitement, that thrill can quickly fade.

There is one characteristic of a deadline though that’s more powerful than all of the others combined, and it’s also under your control: its proximity. One group of researchers at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington has argued that a close deadline brings rewards closer, increases the challenge and raises motivation. It creates two psychological states, they argue: urgency and “felt accountability.”

Clearly, no one is going to ask for a tighter deadline just so that a task feels more urgent but deadlines can be made to feel closer simply by placing smaller versions—milestones—before the final due date.

Celebrating a Milestone with a Million-Dollar Party

This is something that happens anyway, argue the Foster Business School researchers in the book, Work Motivation: Past, Present, and Future. Using secretaries as an example, they describe how employees faced with a deadline continually assess their progress towards the goal, reallocating their time and effort depending their assessment of whether they’re likely to finish on schedule. In effect, workers are creating mental milestones that tell them whether they’re on the right track.

Those milestones can be built up and made concrete. Dan Carrison, writing in Deadline! How Premier Organizations Win the Race Against Time, describes how Boeing organized a massive party to celebrate the first time all of the components of its new widebody 777 jetliner were put together. The company didn’t just invite all of the engineers and employees who had worked on every part of the plane to mark the event—which would have opened the celebration to 10,000 people—it invited their families too. Altogether, more than 100,000 people were able to tour the plane as proud relatives showed off the screws they had attached and the wing parts they had designed.

But the plane wasn’t finished. It would be another two years before it made its first flight. This wasn’t a celebration of the end of a job. It was an attempt to encourage workers to complete the task on time. Engineers were able to see what their work had achieved so far. They were able to understand what completing the project would create. And by allowing employees to bring their families, Boeing was able to recruit a giant team of cheerleaders: wives, husbands and children who would ask their staff about the big plane over the dinner table.

A party after the project is completed is a reward, Carrison writes. A party held while the project is still under way—when it’s met a milestone—is a motivational strategy.

Of course, you don’t have to throw a million-dollar party to mark your milestones but knowing when they are, celebrating their achievement and letting others know when you expect to be done can all keep you focused and motivated, even when the final deadline is far away.

Photography: drurydrama (Len Radin)

Being an artist always seems like such a lonely job. They always have to work alone, surrounded by half-completed canvases, overturned paint pots and wobbly easels. At best, they’ll have a model to console themselves with at the end of the day – unless they’re painting a still life – but usually, if a painter talks about his ideas, it’s to himself and to his work in progress. Writers are little better. Although many have been known for their ability to down the odd bottle with friends at the end of an unproductive day, a hack’s best collaborator has always been his moleskin or his typewriter, not a loyal group of friends. But the notion that ideas come best when we’re alone, often in the shower, might well be one of creativity’s biggest myths. In fact, group work can bring out some of the best concepts.

We can see this at the highest end of art. The work of an Impressionist painter always reflects his own ability; it’s produced by just one pair of hands. But the ideas that went into the final picture are the results of long discussion among the painters themselves about what art should be and how to produce it, discussions held in bars and cafes and continued afterwards by letter. None of those ideas – and Impressionism itself – could have been produced by just one artist working alone.

The same is true of the kind of creative thinking that led to some of science’s greatest breakthroughs. In Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius, Michael Michalko describes how Einstein, Eisenberg, Pauli and Bohr were almost unique among scientists of the day for their informal meetings and open conversations. While other scientists kept their thoughts to themselves in case they were described as controversial or revealed their mistakes, the real breakthroughs came from the scientists who weren’t afraid to speak their minds, even when what was on their mind was only half-formed.

The Creative Thinking of the Impressionists

If the café chats between the Impressionist painters like those held at the Café Geurbois where Monet, Sisley, Cezanne and Pissarro would meet, or the talks between Einstein and Eisenberg were productive it might well be because they followed the principles of “koinonia,” a Greek term that describes the sharing of ideas. Socrates was so fond of these kinds of group dialogue, says Michalko, that he and his colleagues formed principles that guided the discussion. Participants had to listen carefully to each other, identify and remove their assumptions, talk honestly without fear of sparking controversy and, when disagreeing, avoid arguing or interrupting another speaker. Koinonia, says Michalko, allows “a group to access a larger pool of common thoughts that cannot be accessed individually.”

But as anyone who has sat through a brainstorming session knows, koinonia is much easier to say than to do. Forming a group to spark creativity and inspire new ideas means doing more than listening respectfully and biting your tongue when someone says something stupid. It also means finding the right people to form the group with. You could argue that if you put Monet, Sisley, Cezanne and Pissarro in a room together, you would have to put a lot of absinthe on the table to stop the good ideas from flowing. Put a manager in the room with his creative team and you’re going to find that the first thing people will do is clam up. When participants feel that their ideas are being judged – and that their chances of promotion depend on not saying the wrong thing – they will censor themselves. Worse, they’ll try to say the things that match the ideas of the most important person in the room, even when his ideas are wrong.

Creative Group Members Must Be Equal

A creative support group then needs to have members who are equal. They might not be of equal status – it’s likely that when Socrates got together with his pals, everyone knew who the smartest guy in the room was – but they should treat each other as equals. While there should be a facilitator, that facilitator’s role isn’t to judge ideas but to guide the discussion and keep it focused on the goal. He or she can also encourage participants to contribute more by notifying them in advance of the subject of the meeting and asking them to bring three ideas with them, or by setting a number of concepts to be created before the end of the session. While some ideas will be unusable, having to make up the numbers may generate some original thinking.

It would be great if all creative support groups worked that way but it’s clear they don’t. In practice, many sessions tend to be dominated by a small group within the group or people find themselves agreeing with each other so much that few, if any new ideas, are generated. But that isn’t always a terrible thing either because creative support groups actually come in two different forms.

While some support groups inspire creativity, others help creative types to implement those ideas. Writer’s groups, for example, tend to fall into the second category. Aspiring authors rarely come together to talk about the role of literature or to toss around new story ideas. Instead, they focus on reading each other’s works and giving advice on how they could be improved. This isn’t feedback that inspires creativity; it’s criticism that produces better craftsmanship. It’s valuable but it’s not quite the same as inspiring creativity.

Putting together a support group that helps with creativity then isn’t easy. While it’s simple enough to follow the rules of fair and open dialogue, and to set up processes that encourage thinking and contributions, an effective group depends mostly on the people in it. They have to be people you can consider as friends not rivals, people you respect but don’t compete with, and people who will listen without judging. And if they’re as smart as Einstein or as visionary as Monet, that would be a big help too.

Image by: Austin Kleon

Choosing an organizational system can feel a little like picking your favorite cult. Whatever system you’re weighing up, you’ll always find teams of people ready to tell you how it’s changed their lives, made them more efficient and allowed them to achieve more than they ever thought possible. That’s particularly true when one of the systems you’re considering is Getting Things Done (GTD), David Allen’s “productivity principles for work and life.”

But despite what GTD’s fans will tell you — and they’ll be ready to tell you a lot — David Allen’s methods aren’t the only organizational system in town. Mindmapping can be no less effective in planning what needs to be done, filling in the gaps and creating a workflow that takes you from concept to product. So which is the most effective tool and which method should you be turning to as you’re planning your projects?

Mindmapping Keeps Students Awake

Mindmapping is said to have been created by psychology author Tony Buzan, although others have argued that the method has actually been in use for millennia. The motivation is supposed to have been the difficulty of creating lecture notes. They’re a pain to write at a time when students would rather be listening (ideally, and if they’re not sleeping) and they have to be reviewed before the student can make sense of them. Buzan thought that mindmapping would be a much more efficient way of remembering what the lecturer was saying. His brother, Barry Buzan, then described in his book The Mind Map how entrepreneurs and managers could use the same techniques to develop their ideas.

The principle is very simple. Mindmappers begin by placing an image or a word at the center of a page then extend branches around the page leading to single words describing individual aspects of that idea. Multiple colors can be used to show different areas of the concept, the branches describe how those ideas are related, and the distance from the center can be used to express the priority of those aspects.

The result, say mindmap fans, is easy brainstorming and a representation of an idea that’s free to grow organically, instead of being forced into the kind of linear structure that might restrict natural growth.

As an added bonus, the visual characteristics of a mindmap are supposed to make its contents easy to remember. One study found that mindmapping increased recall in students who used it by as much as 10 percent. The same study though also found that students really didn’t like to use it.

GTD Needs a Road Map

There’s really not a huge amount to mindmapping then. It doesn’t take long to get to grips with and it’s very easy to understand. GTD, on the other hand, needs a road map to understand. Designed by coach and management consultant David Allen, GTD works on a number of different levels. It uses a five-step information workflow made up of: collect; process; organize; review; and do. Plans are divided into six focus levels: current actions; current projects; areas of responsibility; yearly goals; five-year vision; and life goals. And then there’s the five-level “natural planning” process which organizes action by: defining a task’s purpose and principles; envisioning the outcome; brainstorming; organizing; and identifying next actions.

And it’s all centered on lists placed in 43 folders for monthly and daily planning. Plus a “tickler file,” which is a kind of procrastination box used to push nasty jobs to a definite point in the future.

In a straight scrap then, Occam’s Razor would make pretty short work of GTD. If the simplest solution is always the best, then Tony Buzan always beats David Allen into a messy pulp.

But it’s not that simple. GTD is more complex than mindmapping because it’s trying to do a lot more. Mindmaps have two functions: they draw out thoughts, allowing creative thinkers to dream up new concepts and link them together; and they make it easier for those thinkers to remember what they’ve been imagining. Mindmaps generate ideas, structure them, organize them and help people to become familiar with them. And then they stop.

It’s the next stage though that’s much harder. You still have act on those ideas, and that’s always going to require far more organization. A mindmap for a new iPhone app, for example, might place a bodybuilding image in the center then have different branches leading to areas for exercise regimes, diet-tracking features, updates from bodybuilding events and motivational slogans. The branches would contain words that remind the developer of the different features the app would contain and inspire him to add new ones.

Creating the app though, would mean hiring a programmer, designing the navigation system, deciding on the look and the designs, fixing a sales price, writing the copy, submitting it for approval, and finding ways to market it. That’s a lot harder than sitting on a sofa and scribbling single words on a page then connecting them with wavy lines.

But if it’s hard, it’s not always made easier by trying to figure out what David Allen meant by a “mind-sweep” (it appears to be collecting then ditching thoughts you don’t need), deciding whether to write one list or multiple sub-lists, and trying to figure out whether you should “do it, delegate it, defer it, or drop it,” another of Allen’s set of task rules.

In theory then, mindmapping and GTD aren’t really in opposition. Mindmapping is about concepts and ideas. It’s for brainstorming and thinking, not for planning and doing. GTD, on the other hand, is supposed to make action more organized. While it does have elements that are supposed to help creativity, it’s main role is to ensure that the thoughts you’ve already had are turned into plans — and that those plans are turned into action.

In practice though, by the time you’ve finished coloring in the different branches on your mindmap and highlighting the various aspects of your idea, you’re already going to be fairly tired — and possibly fed up with your concept. Toss in the creation of 43 folders and the endless lists that David Allen will have you writing and you’ll be lucky if you have the energy to get anything done at all.

Fortunately, in the end it doesn’t matter which organizational system you use as long as the result is that you stop organizing and start doing.

Photography: smileygeekgirl

Start working for yourself and distractions suddenly become a great deal more destructive. You might been bothered in the past by a colleague talking too loudly in the next cubicle. The constant drip of emails into your inbox might have been pulling you away from your projects. But when the money you received at the end of the month was always the same regardless of how much you produced, it didn’t really matter how often you went back to the watercooler to escape the noise or how much time you spent looking at lolcats. Become your own boss, and those distractions aren’t just mildly irritating (or even lots of fun), they’re expensive timewasters that reduce your monthly income.

It’s when you calculate the amount of money you’re losing when you let distractions pull you away from work that you realize just how much those trivialities are costing you. If you’re charging $50 an hour, for example, and spend twenty minutes a day looking at friends’ feeds on Facebook and ten minutes a day writing jokey emails, then you just spent $25 for that entertainment. That’s about three times the price of a movie ticket.

A workday will always have some distractions but there are things you can do to minimize the power — and the cost — of the biggest timesucks.

Avoid People

People are the most powerful distracters. They’re demanding, they’re everywhere and they get offended when you ignore them. While working from home will mean that you have fewer people milling about the office looking for a conversation, it doesn’t make you completely incommunicado. You have to do that yourself.

So children have to be taken care of. Trying to work with little ones running around your feet rarely works out. They’ll be demanding your attention long before you’ll have completed your project, and they’re the hardest people to ignore. This is one instance when multitasking just doesn’t work, so divide the time, get help and make sure that when you’re at work, you’re working, and when you’re with the kids, you’re far from the computer.

Unless it’s a real emergency. In that case, you can always call on the TV to do its job, at least for a while.

Grown-ups are a little easier. They understand when you shut the door, even if they don’t like it. You can also choose to use voicemail instead of answering the phone to everyone who calls, turn off your chat programs and set specific times to answer email.

While people can be giant moving sources of distraction, they’re not too difficult to avoid.

Surf Smartly

The Web though is unavoidable. With around a quarter of a billion websites and plenty of unseen content that you probably should read and certainly would enjoy reading, it’s not hard to justify taking a few minutes to catch up on the news or check out the latest tweets.

The solution looks simple. You can turn the Internet off. If you don’t have the self-discipline to pull the plug or shut down your wireless connection (and who does?) you can always pack your laptop off to a spot with no connection at all. Or use a program that blocks access to certain sites except for set times of day.

But that’s a mistake. There’s only one greater source of distraction than the Internet, and that’s its absence. Instead of looking for a few minutes at the latest headlines, you’ll be wasting ten-minute blocks wondering if it’s really possible to get a connection when there’s only one bar showing. Or trying to figure out whether it’s possible to beat the blocker.

So don’t try to avoid the Web. Instead, use it smartly. Open sites that you can read in nibble-sized chunks. Twitter is good because you can read the tweets with a look. News sites can also be useful because by the time you’ve hit refresh and waited for the new headlines to load, you’ll be ready to head back to your work.

Shut down your browser completely though and deciding what site to open will take enough mental effort to pull you completely away from what you should be doing. Leave it open and when you find the cursor heading towards the toolbar, you’ll be able to keep the distraction to a minimum, even if you can’t get rid of it completely.

Turn Off the Silence

Noise is also supposed to be a distraction, but that’s not always the case. Much depends on the type of noise you’re hearing and the type of working you’re trying to do. A repetitive banging or a constant dripping will always be more off-putting than a piano concerto. And complete silence is so unusual that its presence can be even more distracting than a little background noise.

But music also brings a structure. Songs and albums are a set length, so you can tell yourself that you’ll keep cracking on until you reach the end — and you always know when that end is coming. Even talk radio like NPR can bring a schedule that can help to retain focus at least until the end of the program.

The key then isn’t to find a space in the library where you can’t hear anyone scream but to find the right kind of noise to match your project. For those whose work requires playing with words, classical music or tunes in foreign languages can work well. When the work is tedious and requires more physical than mental effort — such as data entry or QA — talk radio can keep the curious part of your mind occupied while the rest of you sticks with what you should be doing.

And even the background din of a café can be helpful. It’s not just the call of the baristas or the buzz of conversation that will keep you staring at the screen but the fact that you’re alone with a computer. That’s fine when you’re looking at the keyboard but spend any more than a few seconds gazing around the room with no one to talk to and you start to look a little weird. Reminding yourself of that should be enough to distract you from your distraction.

It’s impossible to work for eight hours (or more) straight without being distracted at all. But when you’re working for yourself, it is worth identifying the biggest slackers — and firing them.

Photography: koalazymonkey

What could be easier than making a to-do list? You just write down all of the things you want to do… then get on with doing them. It sounds so simple and yet with a little thought and a strong inclination to procrastinate, creating a list can quickly become a research project all of its own. There is, after all, a difference between the things you have to do and the things you’d like to do. And there are differences too between what you really have to do and what you probably should do… just as there are differences between the things you think you’d enjoy doing and maybe you’ll do one day, and the things you know you’ll enjoy doing and sincerely hope that you’ll do. Which of these kinds of tasks should go on your to-do list, how do you prioritize them and how do you stop your list from becoming so overwhelming that having written down everything you plan to do, all you really want to do is hide under a blanket and do nothing? Lists-making might look simple, but when you’re trying to organize your time, your life and your tasks, it’s vital to know how they work.

The simplest kinds of lists are tiered lists. These allow you to prioritize your tasks so that you can see instantly what needs to be done first. Alan Lakein, author of How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, recommends these kinds of lists in his time management system.

Prioritizing Your ABC Lists

For Lakein, tasks are categorized into three lists, marked “A”, “B” and “C”.  A-list tasks need to be completed within a day, B-list tasks should be done in a week, and C-listers are supposed to be completed by the end of a month. Within each list, tasks can also be prioritized either by writing them in order of urgency or by assigning each task a number. So the most important task each day will be A-1; the least important might be C-23. Beneath each task, you should also write the goal-specific activities needed to complete them.

As time management systems go, it’s remarkably simple.  But while that can be a benefit, it also brings limitations. Because the system doesn’t distinguish between tasks that can be completed quickly and those that need more time, it’s easy to get the prioritization wrong. A small job, such as writing a quick email or giving a quote, might be less urgent than a tougher job, such as completing a white paper or writing a report. But if it can be done in minutes, getting it out of the way can help to bring clarity, increased focus on the remaining tasks — and the satisfaction of crossing an item off the list. Events too have a habit of increasing the length of the lists even as you’re working through them. That means tasks don’t get completed and instead are shunted on to the B list… which then begins to form a new A list, parts of which are shunted onto the next B list and so on. Instead of feeling as though you’re achieving your goals, you can often feel as though you’re simply reorganizing tasks.

Mark Forster, a business coach and author of Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management, takes a slightly different approach. His “closed lists” are intended to set a boundary on the work that needs to be completed. Having made a list of all the tasks that need to be completed within a day, you draw a line underneath the list to mark it off and provide yourself with the kind of reinforcement that helps to say “no” to more work. And if you can’t say “no,” anything else you take on has to be added to the next day’s list — or in the worst case, placed below the line.

The aim each day then is to complete all the items above the line, then the items below it. Keeping track of the amount you manage to complete each day will also provide a good idea of the amount that it’s possible to get done in a day so that future lists will be more accurate. The main benefit though should be a methodology that enables you both to plan the day and deal with the inevitable interruptions that crop up so that each day’s to-do list is always finished.

Recently, Forster has honed his system a little further with “Autofocus” which uses closed sub-lists and intuitive choices to guide prioritization.

Four Lists and 43 Folders

If that sounds like it’s starting to get a lot more complicated, then David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity system takes things up a whole new level. Allen recommends creating four different kinds of lists.

“Project” lists describe goals rather than actions. They aren’t followed on a day-to-day basis and the tasks they contain aren’t ticked off regularly. But they are reviewed weekly to ensure that you’re on the right track and in control of events rather than allowing events to control you. A project list may, of course, be subdivided into smaller project lists.

“Action” lists, which contain specific tasks, will almost always be subdivided and may be broken into sublists as detailed as “Calls,” “Errands” and “To Read.” Placing the lists in context is supposed to make them easier to complete.

“Waiting for” lists are projects which can’t continue until the next step has been completed by someone else; and the items on the “Someday/maybe” list are the long-term goals you really hope to reach one day. The support material required to complete the tasks on all of these different lists should be filed in 43 folders.

It’s a system that’s completely comprehensive and fiendishly complicated, and its adherents swear by it even as they adjust it to fit their own lives.

And that’s really the key to using lists for productivity. It’s not the list-making that’s important but completing the tasks on the list. A simple list system like Alan Lakein’s is fine if you know what you need to do and what you have to do to complete it. Mark Forster’s is good too if the kind of interruptions you receive are rare and easily manageable. And David Allen’s structures appear to work for geeky types who can make sense of his workflows. Inevitably, you should find yourself gravitating towards the organization system that works best for you — and which,  unlike this lady, gets the work done.

Viral marketing has become the Holy Grail for just about any business with a small budget and big dreams. Let Coca Cola cough up the millions for a 30-second slot during the Superbowl. Let L’Oreal pay through the nose to get the name of its moisturizers seen on the walls of reality TV shows. Savvy small companies can pick up a reach that’s just as broad and even more powerful by sidestepping the expensive conventional channels. Give the public a reason to talk about them and they’ll get to spread the name of their business for next to nothing, helped by an army of happy gossipers. All you need is a place to start.

And an understanding that it’s not that easy. A deliberately planned viral marketing campaign, one that has the aim of improving a company’s sales, needs three elements: content, distribution and response.

Content is the DNA of the virus, the element that encourages the people who receive it to react and pass it on to their friends. For many marketers, that means something cool and creative. Burger King’s Subservient Chicken was one of the most famous examples. Created in 2005 for the fast food chain by ad company The Barbarian Group, the site took a literal interpretation of the slogan “Get chicken just the way you like it.” It placed an actor (actually, a costume designer; the actor refused to do it) in a chicken outfit and filmed him performing about 300 different moves. Users who reached the website could enter commands into a text field and see the chicken apparently obey those commands.

The interactivity made the campaign a hit. A day after the site was launched, it had a million hits. A week later it had 20 million. While Burger King didn’t release actual sales figures, it did report that in the month after releasing its chicken sandwich, the company saw “double-digit” growth in awareness and a “significant” increase in sales.

Big Ideas or Free Ideas

But coming up with smart ideas like subservient chickens isn’t easy. Creative concepts only work when they’re original so they can’t be copied, but it is possible to copy the approach. The Subservient Chicken worked because it took Burger King’s chicken sandwich slogan to ridiculous lengths. Blendtec’s series of YouTube videos, in which company founder Tom Dickson shows off the strength of his blenders by blending bizarre items including cell phones, silly putty and a running video camera, worked in a similar way.

One place to begin then is by looking at what your product does and asking just what it could do if you pushed it to the limits. Put the results online and if it looks bizarre enough, you might have people lining up to see it.

Alternatively, you can give your product away.

Creativity might be fun but freebies are just as powerful, and they’re a lot easier. Let the world know that you’ll be handing out something for nothing and it won’t be long before people are rushing to tell their friends.

The simplest type of freebie is usually an ebook or downloadable report. Because these can be copied and distributed easily, they will be — provided that the information is high enough quality. It has to be usable, practical and valuable. An information product like that might not reach a massive audience but it should saturate your main market, putting your name in front of anyone who needs to know it.

It’s also possible though to give away something that you know everyone will want. Earlier this year, Moonfruit, a company that sells and hosts websites, decided to mark its tenth anniversary by giving away ten Macbook pros. That wasn’t a cheap campaign — and despite its image, viral marketing is rarely free — but traffic to Moonfruit’s site increased by a factor of eight.

Twitter Changes Viral Distribution

The Subservient Chicken was hosted on a website but it was promoted conventionally, mostly through TV spots that included the chicken. It was those ads that kick-started the campaign and generated the word-of-mouth advertising. By the time Moonfruit launched its campaign four years later, the environment had changed completely. The company did it all on Twitter. To be eligible for a free computer, Twitter users simply had to tweet the company name. They could do it as many times as they wanted — and everytime they did it, they spread the name further along Twitter’s network. It’s no wonder that “moonfruit” was the number one trending topic on the site for days.

For viral marketing, distribution has always been difficult. You could create the coolest concept ever but if no one sees it — or if only the wrong people see it — the virus won’t spread. Twitter has made everything a great deal easier by creating a network along which links and information can spread rapidly and effortlessly, but the old principle still applies: for your content to go viral, you still have to put it in front of the right people right at the beginning.

So if you’re planning to use Twitter to launch a viral campaign, you’ll need to make sure, before you launch, that your timeline is active, large and contains plenty of people who also have active timelines and lots of followers. Identify at least a dozen people who retweet regularly and post the tweet announcing your content at a time you know they’ll be active. That should increase the chance that your message will be passed on. Whether it will continue to be passed on along Twitter’s networks depends on the quality of what you’re offering and, on Twitter, the degree to which you can keep the campaign feeling personal.

It’s the last stage that’s the most important though. A viral marketing campaign will make your company known. It will bring people in and lead them to think that you’re cool and trendy. But it will be up to you to ensure that that interest converts into sales. That’s the bit that people often forget. Viral marketing can take off very quickly but it needs to be seen as part of a long term strategy rather than a short-term launch goal. The Subservient Chicken ads got that right by being ready to break the chicken off the Internet and place it in different formats. Moonfruit’s campaign might be forgotten fairly quickly but it did bring people to its website where they were able to play with the company’s site-building software and perhaps purchase a subscription.

When you’re putting together your viral marketing idea, make sure you know what you’re going to do with the interest you receive — and how you’re going to profit from your virus.

Photography: Consumerist

It’s now easier than ever for an entrepreneur to find specialized help with minimal risk. A one-person business can do a pretty good impression of a small company by hiring a creative freelancer – even one on the other side of the planet – without having to pay a regular salary, benefits or get locked into a contract with commitments the growing firm isn’t quite ready to keep. In fact, as anyone who has ever posted a wanted ad on the Internet knows, when it comes to freelance help – even from specialists like Web designers or illustrators — entrepreneurs are spoilt for choice. And with that choice comes challenges. It might be easy enough to find a freelancer but finding one you can rely on requires a whole new bag of skills.

Unreliable freelancers come in a variety of forms. Contact is perhaps the biggest worry for hirers. When the person you’re working with isn’t sitting in the next office, and your biggest communication tool is email, there’s always the danger that your mini-employee has taken your instructions, your mock-ups — and your deposit – and run off to Timbuktu. Or at least relegated dealing with you and your project to the bottom of a to-do list that includes “getting a haircut,” “helping junior with homework,” “building my own company” and “buying a Caribbean island.” Your messages go out but nothing comes back.

For growing businesses, that lack of contact can feel like the worst of all worlds. You’re not certain whether you’re hired help is hired and helping or whether they’ve dropped the project and not bothered to tell you. You don’t know whether you should be looking to give the site plan to someone else, or sitting tight and hoping that it all works out. For many entrepreneurs, the result is stasis, worry and wasted time.

What You Want, When You Want It

That time ends at least when a deadline passes. If a freelancer disappears and still hasn’t made contact after the delivery day then he can have few complaints if you hire someone else. More usually though, missed deadlines — another common characteristic of unreliability — can be seen a long way off. Milestones get missed, apologies are made in advance and dates have to be rearranged. It’s all frustrating stuff and life would be much easier if everything were delivered exactly when you wanted it.

And it would be perfect if you didn’t just get your logo, your design or the copy when you wanted but it was always exactly the work you needed. The quality delivered by freelancers is rarely a hirer’s first worry but perhaps it should be. The kinds of people who make themselves available for freelancing range from stay-at-home moms hoping to make a few extra bucks from the doodling they’ve been doing for fun to seasoned pros who have long been making a living out of their training, talent and skills. If you’re lucky — and you’re willing to pay the full rate — you’ll get the second type. Get the first and you could find yourself unexpectedly looking at an image you can’t use or a design that needs to be redone almost entirely.

Finding — and Creating — Reliable Freelancers

Each of these problems has fixes. Communication trouble can be solved by having more than one way of staying in touch, and it also helps to restrict the number of contacts. Shoot out an email every time you get a new idea or whenever you want to alert your freelancer to a model you’ve spotted and they won’t all be answered. If all she does is answer your emails, she’s not going to be working on your project. Save up all your comments for one email a day. And understand too that people respond to email at different times. You might treat email as chat and reply to a message you receive immediately, but others are happy to wait. Many followers of Getting Things Done, for example, aim to increase their productivity by only writing long emails at the beginning and end of the day.

Deadlines can also require flexibility and are often broken even outside the world of freelancing. Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, once said that he loved deadlines; he enjoyed the “whooshing sound they make as they fly past.” Assume that there’s always a chance that deadlines might be missed and set them so that they can be adjusted.  And as you approach the deadline, track the project’s progress so that you can see how close the finish actually is. For tasks like website design, you should be able to see how many pages have been completed and what still needs to be done.

Both of those are fairly straightforward. It’s finding a freelancer whose quality you can rely on that’s much harder, but there are a number of options here too. Freelance sites like Elance, Scriptlance and Guru all have feedback ratings and portfolio spaces but don’t rely on those ratings — or those sites — when you’re looking for someone reliable. Different clients are satisfied with different levels of quality. Nor is it easy to compare the work of creative people who are meant to think outside the box. So to get a deeper impression and to understand whether a freelancer might be good for you, try social media. If the person you’re considering is on Twitter, their tweets should give you an idea of their personality, their interests and what they’re saying about their current clients. You might also be able to find comments, links and examples of projects they’ve recently completed to supplement the top picks that made it into the portfolio.

More importantly, social media can also give you word-of-mouth recommendations. Search for the type of freelancer you need on Twitter’s search engine and there’s a good chance that you’ll find plenty of other people tweeting the same need. You’ll be able to check their timelines and see who’s replied to them and who is getting the recommendations. There’s usually plenty to choose from. A search for “web designer” turned up three requests, a  job search from a design company and a personal recommendation, complete with sample link, all posted in the space of an hour.

But if you really want to check the quality of a freelancer you’re considering, forget the generic terms and get specific. Instead of searching for “programmer,” search for “ajax,” “vectors” or some other term that would only be discussed by a freelancer who knows his stuff — and likes talking about it. Groups on Facebook, such as “Web Design,” can also be rich hunting grounds where you can browse the discussions and offer work to the contributors with the best ideas.

Even LinkedIn can be useful for plotting someone’s previous work experience, especially the short periods which they might have left off their freelance profile.

If all of that research sounds like more work than you’re really inclined to do, it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s not unusual for freelance-employer relationships to break down quickly. Companies often find themselves ditching flakey freelancers then searching around for a more reliable replacement, often on a much tighter deadline and far smaller budgets.

Investing the time and effort to find someone you can rely on when you first hire a freelancer is always the best move, second only to the most important one: when you do find a freelancer you can rely on, make sure you keep her because there aren’t too many of them around.

Deciding how much to charge is both the first and the toughest issue that freelancers face. Economists will tell you that the correct price is always the highest amount that the market will pay, and business experts will tell you that you can figure that out by looking at your competitors’ price lists. But what no one will tell you is who your competitors are. When you pitch for a job, are you competing with other freelancers in your town? Or with other freelancers anywhere with similar skills? When you’re looking to pitch your own fees, whose prices should you be looking at?

The difference is important. Now that virtual companies can create virtual teams made up of qualified people in parts of the world you might never have heard of, identifying competitors isn’t always easy. It’s tempting, for example, to dismiss entirely a competing bid from a programmer in Mumbai whose price demands are half of yours. If they’re charging so much less, then their qualifications and experience must be that much lower. But if their living expenses are a quarter of yours, then in fact, they’re asking for twice as much – and a client could be paying half the amount you charge for someone twice as good.

How Much Does a Big Mac Cost to You?

It’s a question of purchasing power parity (PPP), an issue that few freelancers or their clients are likely to have considered but one which we all increasingly need to bear in mind as we make bids and assess offers. Telecommuting means that equally qualified people can be submitting bids from areas with very unequal economies.

The principle of PPP is that in a perfectly efficient market, identical products will have just one price. Exchange rates then should move towards the rate at which those products reflect that price. The Economist famously uses the Big Mac to represent an identical product sold in 120 countries because the burgers largely use local ingredients: bread, beef, cheese, tomatoes, advertising, packaging etc. Comparing the prices of Big Macs in various parts of the world with the official exchange rates should reveal whether a currency is over- or undervalued. According to the latest compilation of the Big Mac index, the iconic double-burger cost an average of $3.54 in the US but $5.60 in Switzerland and $1.74 in Indonesia. Because the exchange rates alone didn’t reflect those differences, the Swiss Franc was described as 58 percent overvalued and the Indonesian Rupiah 51 percent undervalued.

That’s nice to know if you’re hungry in Indonesia or Switzerland (and have a steel stomach and no taste buds) but what does it mean for freelancers? A report conducted by UBS recently provided a slightly more useful take. It offered an alternative Big Mac index that looked at the number of hours it takes to earn the money needed to buy a Big Mac in 73 cities. In Chicago, Tokyo and Toronto, a typical worker only has to sweat for twelve minutes to afford the burger; in Nairobi, they’d still be going hungry two-and-a-half hours later.

Of course, the Big Mac isn’t a perfect model. In Chicago, it’s poor man’s food; in Nairobi, McDonalds is where the foreigners and the nouveau riche hang out. But the principle should be clear: when it comes to setting a price, it’s not the figure that matters, but what you can do with that figure when you receive it.

World Quality Demands a World Price

For example, a buyer might find himself considering bids from two freelance designers charging $30 an hour. The first freelancer lives in Chicago; the second in Sao Paulo. To the buyer, the price isn’t an issue — whichever supplier he chooses the cost will be the same. But a glance at the alternative Big Mac index shows that in PPP terms, the Brazilian designer is more than three times as expensive. If he’s not three times better, then the buyer will be paying more than the real value of the supplier’s work. Of course, if that Brazilian designer is better at all than the Chicagoan, then to the buyer, that extra value has arrived for free.

Buyers then need to be aware not just of the amounts they’re being asked to pay but what they should expect in return for that money. For sellers, it’s a little more complex. Clearly, freelancers working in low-cost economies and selling to higher-priced economies should have an advantage. Charge a US buyer a rate that conforms to PPP — a price equal to the one charged by an American supplier — and they’re giving up an advantage. If they charge less, they can undercut competition in the buyer’s local market and still earn more than their cost of living demands. But if a buyer is prepared to pay a certain rate for a set quality of work then accepting less for that service means that they’re selling themselves cheap.

In practice, when things get this complex, simple economics takes over. Freelancers, wherever they may be, tend to look at the quality of the service they offer and consider the competition on a global scale. When they believe the quality they offer is truly world-class — and hard to find anywhere in the world — they feel free to charge the highest rates a buyer is willing to pay. When they feel their work falls short of that level, they use their price advantage to bring in work.

And for buyers too, things become much simpler when they stop comparing prices and start comparing portfolios. When they know what they’re willing to pay and can see what they can get for that money then how many Big Macs their supplier is buying when the job is done soon becomes irrelevant.

The bottom line is that the ease of telecommuting and the ability to work virtually from anywhere in the world has been good news for buyers who now have a greater range of suppliers to choose from. And it’s been good news too for freelancers who can now pitch their services anywhere and charge the highest possible rates for the highest quality work wherever they may be.

The only losers, in fact, are low-quality suppliers pitching in countries with expensive Big Macs.

Photography: quinn.anya

You should be able to spot a creative type from a mile away. In Mad Men, the AMC show set in a 1960s advertising agency, that’s not so easy. Both the executives and the creative staff wear suits. Both chain smoke as though it were going out of fashion. And both have similarly dull offices where the only creativity-sparkers are bottles of Bourbon and a sofa with a dent shaped like a secretary. Compare that to today’s attitude to creativity. Software firms like Google are famous for stuffing offices with giant rubber balls, lava lamps and idea boards. Sofas have been replaced with beanbags. And not even the CEO wears a suit. Without the right toys and bags of freedom, it seems, those creative employees just aren’t going to be churning out the ideas to keep an innovative company in business. In fact, the need for a child-like environment is just one of a number of myths about creativity that are not only wrong but which can actually hold a firm back.

Here are several more.

Brainstorming is the Best Way to Generate New Ideas

Whenever a firm is looking for a new direction, a new product or a solution to an aching problem, the temptation is often to call together a bunch of heavy-thinkers for a brainstorming session. By bouncing ideas off each other, the best option should quickly emerge. Or so the story goes.

In fact, creativity just doesn’t work like that. Psychologists have found that putting people together in the same room produces fewer and lower quality ideas than allowing people to do their thinking alone and in private. One study found that the number of new ideas actually fell by half when people are asked to think together.

And instilling a sense of competition makes the situation even worse. When employees feel that their careers depend on producing better ideas than their colleagues can create, they tend to keep their thoughts to themselves and pick holes in concepts produced by others.

In general, the best ideas come from people who are passionate about their work, and allowed to mull them over in private.

Deadlines Generate Creativity

And with plenty of time too. Another myth concerning creativity is that tight deadlines spark the best ideas. Not true. According to Keith Sawyer, author of “Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration,” tight deadlines can increase productivity but if they have any effect on creativity, it’s to dull innovative thinking. Ideas need time to emerge, he says.

Teresa Amabile, who runs the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and whose research program specializes in creativity, agrees. She found that time pressures stifle creativity because they don’t allow people to fully engage with a problem. Worse, not only did the stress limit creativity before the deadline, but they continued to drag down creative thinking for another two days afterwards.

In fact, says Amabile, the best predictor of a creative day is a happy day before.

Good Ideas Must Come from Creative Types

Perhaps the most prevalent myth concerning creativity is that there are certain creative types. They dress funny, read comic books and have jobs in design, copywriting or fashion that require plenty of out-of-the-box thinking.

If you want a new idea, it’s the Creative Department you want to call, not the mail room.

But that’s not true either. While some individuals are clearly more creative than others, there’s no shortage of creative thinking right across organizations. The best way to judge whether someone is likely to produce a creative response to a problem isn’t by looking at their job title but by seeing how my much they enjoy what they do.

In general, the people who are most engaged by their work and feel the closest connection to the company are the people most likely to put in the extra brain work to come up with new ideas.

Disorganization Is the By-Product of Creativity

And if the title on the office door isn’t always the best sign of a source of creative solutions, neither is the mess inside the office. To many people, creative types are often a kind of manic genius: slightly bi-polar and incapable of dealing with the day-to-day tasks — like cleaning. So their offices are disorganized, their desks buried under piles of books and notes, and if they have a task manager, it was lost years ago.

Not only is that a stereotype, it’s also completely wrong. Creativity needs the space for ideas to grow and develop — without distractions. Working in a disorganized space though can sometimes generate its own diversions. Instead of thinking about the next step in the process, you can be tempted to turn your mind towards tidying up a pile of papers or picking up the trash on the floor. A clean, comfortable space can often deliver so much more.

A Good Idea Comes Fully-Formed

That development is vital too. Light bulbs only appear over people’s heads in cartoons. For the rest of us inspiration is a process. It begins with a concept that looks promising. Then excitement settles in and then the creative process takes over, looking at the possible problems during implementation and the potential for the idea to work in areas beyond solving the immediate problem.

As long as the atmosphere in an organization is collaborative rather than competitive, the idea is then shared, flaws pointed out and new potential identified. The final result might look nothing like the original concept.

Twitter is perhaps the best example of this. The original idea was to create a platform that would allow for the public access of mobile text messages. That it’s become so much more is the result of allowing users to develop the site in whatever direction they wanted, from trend-watching to live chatting. The users checked all the boxes for creativity: they felt engaged with the product; they were passionate about it; they working alone or in virtual teams rather than real groups; they had time to think about their ideas without deadlines getting in the way; and they were collaborative, not competitive.

While the myths about creativity might be destructive then, the best thing about innovation is that when the conditions are right, there’s little you can do to stop it.

Photography: Daniel Y. Go

In an ideal world, the people with the brightest ideas, the most original minds and the most inspired inventions would end their lives with the most amount of money. They might not have been the ones who turned their spark of genius into production lines and mass sales, but they should have been rewarded fairly for the brainwave that defined the products.

Often, it happens. James Dyson, the inventor of the Ballbarrow, a wheelbarrow that used a ball instead of a wheel, lived off his wife’s salary as an art teacher for five years while he developed a prototype for a new kind of vacuum cleaner. He now owns a chateau in France and a personal fortune estimated at around £1 billion ($1.6 billion). Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer, might not be in the same economic league but his annual salary was reported at “more than £1 million ($1.6 million)” a year… in 2003. He’s probably earning a bit more than that now and, no doubt,  gets a free iPod too.

But not everyone is so lucky. Here are five creative types whose ideas either haven’t translated into material success yet… or never will, and what the rest of us can learn from their financial failure.

Bust at Sixteen

She’s not the most famous person on our list but Kira Plastinina is certainly the youngest.  In May 2008, the 16-year old Russian fashion designer opened twelve boutiques across the USA with plans to open another 250 stores.

Nine months later, the KP Fashion Co. filed for bankruptcy. The company owed $54.5 million to more than 100 creditors, including Verizon, the Glendale Police Department and Ford Models Inc. According to the bankruptcy filing, it had less than a fifth of that in assets and was involved in a trademark infringement suit brought by Pacific Sunwear.

Kira was helped by having good contacts. Her daddy is Sergei Plastinin, a former chief executive of Russia’s largest dairy and juice producer, who has a personal fortune estimated at more than $600 million. He is said to have put $80 million of his own money into his daughter’s business. But it might have helped more if instead of asking for a handout, she had done a little market research and produced designs that didn’t compete directly with those Paris Hilton, Avril Lavigne and Jessica Simpson.

There’s a reason even creative types have to pay their dues if they want to succeed in the business world. On the other hand, Kira is still big in Kazakhstan.

When Beautiful Designs Go Bad

Kira Plastinina failed because she didn’t have the experience to back her ambitions. That wasn’t the case for John DeLorean. By the time he set up his DeLorean Motor Company, he was in his fifties with a track record that included designing a new gearbox for the Packard Motor Company, taking the credit for creating America’s first muscle car and heading General Motors’ Pontiac division. His new car, a two-seater designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, would feature eye-catching gull-wing doors and a look that would be immortalized in Back to the Future.

Despite a £100 million (now $160 million) investment by the British government, the firm collapsed in February 1982 after operating for little more than a year. DeLorean  himself later faced trial after allegedly agreeing to take part in a drug trafficking operation to help pay off the company’s debts. He was acquitted after claiming entrapment.

It’s tempting to see here a rerun of Kira Plastinina’s failure: when money comes in too easily, it goes out easily too. But it’s probably got more to do with hubris and the belief that if you spend enough money on an attractive enough product, people will buy it. Sometimes you barely get to make it.

Cooking up a Storm

Celebrity chef John Burton Race did get to make it – several times a day. In 2004, together with his wife Kim Burton Race, he opened the New Angel restaurant in Devon, UK. The opening of the restaurant was documented by a British reality show and the venue went on to win Michelin’s coveted stars.

Three years later, while he was in Australia filming a series of the reality show “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me out of Here,” his wife shut down the restaurant. The New Angel was sold to Burton Race’s friend Internet entrepreneur Clive Jacobs, who then re-employed Burton Race as head chef. In May of this year, Burton Race was declared bankrupt.

Opening a restaurant is always a tricky business but Burton Race might not have chosen his partner too wisely. Three years after opening the restaurant together, Burton Race left his wife to live with his mistress and their 2-year old son.

It’s good business to be inventive in the workplace. But a traditional family life tends to provide stability… especially when you’re running a family business.

Building Too Little for the Future

Today, Louis Kahn is remembered as one of the world’s great architects. A professor of architecture at both Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, he was a master of the International Style and known for his attention to “servant” space – areas in a building that served other open areas.

In 1974, his body was discovered in a public toilet at Penn Station in New York. It took the police several days to identify him. He had died of a heart attack and was bankrupt.

It’s certainly possible that, like Burton Race, Kahn’s convoluted personal life had held him back –  he fathered three children by three different women – but the real cause was probably more prosaic. Kahn continually revised his designs, even after construction had begun, prompting his clients to assign him a manager.

Groundbreaking designs are vital for creative types but you also have to keep a close eye on the cash.

Taking Your Chance

There are few more successful creative types than Walt Disney. The company that carries his name now has a string of brand names recognized around the world and annual revenues of $35 billion.

But life wasn’t always so good for Disney. An early company producing Laugh-O-Grams for Newman cinemas in the Kansas City area was unable to generate enough income to cover the animators’ high salaries. It went bankrupt… and Disney went to Hollywood.

And that might be the best lesson to learn from creatives’ bankruptcy: a failure doesn’t have to be the end of the story. In fact, it might just provide the experience needed to create the next big success.

Freelancers face two giant challenges at the beginning of every new job. They need to agree a price for the work they’ve been asked to do; and they need to agree a deadline for the delivery of that work. Although a lot of attention is paid to the first challenge — calculating hourly rates, comparing the prices of competitors, dreaming of the check — it’s the deadline that’s actually the more important challenge and the hardest one to overcome. Pitch your quote too high and the worst that will happen is that you’ll lose that job. Pitch too low, and you’ll lose money… once. Miss a deadline though, and you could find that you lose a client forever.

Even that though looks welcome when you consider some of the consequences of missing deadlines. Of the roughly 35,000 lawsuits that clients file against lawyers each year, the second most common cause of the suit was that the lawyer failed to meet a deadline. A third of all claims result in damages and in one in six of those claims the damages top $100,000. That would be a high price to pay for being late.

Miss a Deadline, Pay $200,000

Nor are those high costs restricted to highly-paid and well-insured lawyers. When writer Douglas Brinkley missed the deadline for his biography of Jack Kerouac — and in the process, missed the 50^th anniversary of the publication of “On the Road”  — Penguin, his publisher, sued. They demanded the return of his $200,000 advance, half of which Brinkley had already paid to Kerouac’s estate in return for access to the author’s papers. While that’s not a problem that’s likely to affect every freelancer, it is an issue for anyone who demands payments of 50 percent up front. Especially, if they spend the money before completing the project.

But missed deadlines are a threat to everyone, even the most organized of workers (and how many of those are there?) In part, that’s because the late freelancer’s favorite excuse — “It’s not my fault!” — might well have some justification. Ronda Muir, a management consultant with Robin Rolfe, notes that many of the typical management methods used in legal firms actually encourage missed deadlines. By setting dates that fall a long way before the item is actually needed, managers suggest that the deadline is soft and can be missed with no real consequences. And by micromanaging — checking in constantly to see if it’s ready — they take the responsibility for proper pacing away from the worker. If he falls behind, the worker thinks, then the client or manager will spot the problem pretty quickly… so they don’t need to do it themselves. That’s not a training routine limited to law firms.

There are technical solutions. Orbisoft’s Task Manager is supposed to solve the organizational problems that cause projects to fall behind. The Omni Group’s OmniPlan claims that it can make “project management painless.” And, of course, although Getting Things Done isn’t a piece of software, it is about as complex as one. It does seem to work for some people… and exasperate many others.

What all of these solutions have in common though is that they all demand time, something that’s always in short supply when you’re trying to reach a deadline, and seeing your schedule get tighter and tighter.

The Worst Kind of Deadline

The best solutions then might be the least technical and also the least demanding. One solution that many freelancers turn to is the imposition of milestones. Instead of agreeing to hand over the completed project on the final day, the two sides agree delivery dates for partial work. That allows the client to see the work as it’s progressing, ensure that it’s on track and ask for changes while it’s being created instead of waiting until the end. For the freelancer, it can also create a staggered payment schedule.

It’s also a solution that can help service providers to meet even the hardest kinds of deadlines: the ones that are a long way away.

While tight deadlines will always make a service provider sweat, when the time to the deadline is more than twice the amount of time it takes to complete the project, there’s too often a temptation to procrastinate. As smaller projects pop up in the meantime, the larger project with the distant deadline is continually pushed away… until it becomes clear that there’s only half the time needed.

Not all clients want to see half-completed work though, and not all freelancers are happy supplying drafts instead of polished projects that show them at their best, so an alternative solution is to set your own mini-deadlines. You can set a certain number of pages that need to be completed by a certain day, allocate a number of lines of code to write each week, or list the leads that need to be contacted each month.

While the occasional deadline might be missed, attempting to keep to them will always be a good discipline and an effective way of working to schedule.

Not even that though will solve perhaps the most infuriating kind of deadline: the one missed by other members of the team. If you’re waiting on someone else’s work before you can complete your own — or worse, if you’re managing a team of freelancers — it only takes one person to fall behind to put everyone behind schedule.

There’s not a huge amount you can do about that — beyond making sure it’s not you that’s causing the delay. Making sure that the team are in close contact might help. It’s one thing to let down a client or a colleague you’ve never met but when you feel you know the people you’re working then delivering late means that you’re letting down a friend, and that can be painful. Ultimately, though it’s up to the project manager to set deadlines that are tight enough to create focus but still loose enough to take the inevitable delays into account. It might also be possible to set overlapping tasks so that the Web designer, for example, can work with only some of the copy or the marketing team at least have a demo that they can show leads even if the final product isn’t ready yet.

But perhaps the best way to ensure that deadlines aren’t missed is to be honest. It’s never easy to say ‘no’ to a client but if you feel that the deadline is too tight and that you’re not going to make it, suggesting a more realistic date is always a better strategy than having to say ‘no’ on delivery day when the client asks if it’s ready.

Every successful business requires two key elements: a good idea; and the good implementation of that idea. Of those two, the idea itself is the simplest. Inspiration tends to come all at once, without effort and often complete. You don’t need to do any more than slap your forehead and ask yourself why you didn’t think of it before. It’s when you come to put your plan into action that the difficulties begin. The challenges are often unexpected, the costs higher than you planned and your forecasts more optimistic than you might have hoped. And that’s true for even the best prepared and the most experienced of entrepreneurs. While knowing what you want to do is important, having the flexibility to adjust is vital.

Carl Geitz decided to create his own Internet business after a successful career that included managing a product management team at Intuit, creators of QuickBooks and TurboTax. It’s the sort of responsible position that looks good  on business plans and which he might have expected to have prepared him fully for creating a small online sales company.

Managers at big companies though get to delegate the day-to-day work. They formulate strategy and make sure that the team is on the right track, while the actual labor is handed out to the designers, professional marketers and  coders under their control. They’re the people who know how to deal with the technical problems as they crop up and deliver the results without providing detailed reports on how they achieved them.

Entrepreneurs Are on Their Own

When you’re operating your own business though – and when your only resources are you, your computer and your checkbook – the difficulties can be much harder to handle.

“By the nature of my job at Intuit, I understood what went into developing a website or other technology,” Carl told us. “I was exposed to various aspects of Internet marketing, but never had to deal with the nitty gritty.”

The result was a learning experience that offers lessons in business-building not just for Carl but for anyone who wants build even the smallest of Internet companies.

The inspiration for Carl’s business was a cross-country move. Originally from New England, Carl and his family relocated to Nevada and wanted a way to stay in touch with their East Coast roots. As they were unpacking, they came across an heirloom, a detailed family tree created by an aunt of Carl’s wife Nancy, which traced the family’s lineage all the way back to the Revolutionary War.  It was a valuable asset and one they wanted to display. Nowhere though were they able to find a design that was attractive, matched the style of their home and which would allow them to show off their family history.

When the time came to move back east, Carl decided to set up his own business, one that would meet the demand for beautifully designed family tree templates that could be ordered online. Today, ArborArts is Carl’s full-time job – and it’s continued to throw up challenges and surprises.

Perhaps the most important challenge was the expense. ArborArts is completely bootstrapped. The funds come from Carl’s stock options and the appreciation of his home in the years before the decline in real estate prices. So far, Carl has spent over $100,000 on a range of vendors, including artists, Web developers and printers. And then, of course, there’s the lost income that Carl would have earned if he hadn’t been developing ArborArts.

“The biggest expense is really having me spend my time on all the various aspects of pulling the business together instead of drawing a salary,” Carl says.

That means operating with a close eye on the budget, especially in the early days before sales start to come in. Employing in-house staff has to wait until the business is established which demands a reliance on freelancers and outside suppliers. And while that sounds like an ideal solution — a way for a small company to receive expert services without paying a full-time salary – it does affect flexibility.

Freelancers Move Slowly

As awareness of the site grew, Carl would receive feedback from customers and clients but because he had to order the changes from a hired help, he couldn’t make the changes immediately. That slow responsiveness became a major source of  frustration.

“The biggest challenge has probably been moving fast enough to respond to learnings along the way, given limited resources,” explains Carl. “When we want to change the website, or develop a new design with an artist, we are by definition working with an outside supplier who doesn’t have the same turn-around responsiveness of someone working down the hall.”

It’s a difficulty that might be familiar to anyone who’s used to working from home or building on a very tight budget but it’s easy to see why it might be surprising — and irritating — to a former manager used to having an experienced team right on hand.

It’s also avoidable. When Carl built ArborArts, he thought the system through and tried to automate as many of the processes as possible. That’s a reasonable thing to do when you’re expecting a constant stream of sales and don’t want to be packing pictures and sealing boxes yourself. But when the sales are only occasional and you’re still learning about what makes the market tick and how you can best supply it, the result is a system that’s much harder to adjust than one created on an ad-hoc basis.

“If I had it to do over again,” concedes Carl, “I’d use more jerry-rigged operations until we proved out various ideas because of the time and flexibility that approach provides.”

That might be surprising but it is sensible advice. An idea might seem good and even complete when it first bursts into your head,  but the true test comes when you start to put it into practice. In those early days, you do nee d the flexibility to be able to make adjustments and adapt to what you learn about your niche.

Carl’s original plan had ArborArts generating $1 million in revenue in 2010. Today, he says, the company is “well south of that rate.” But he has learned some valuable lessons, and with those early growing pains behind him and the roots laid, he should be able to look forward to some solid growth in the future.

Photography: nedrichards

The name of the end product might be decided by ad men, focus groups and marketing people who think tags are for displaying brand names, but while a project is in development, it’s the programmers who get to come up with the working titles. It sounds creative and fun, an opportunity for geeks to undo their ponytails, let their hair down and come up with something cool and funky.

Often they do, especially when the developers are working for free on open source projects. Ubuntu’s creators, for example, tend to opt for two alliterative words, the second of which is an animal. Choices have included “Gutsy Gibbon” (Ubuntu 7.10), “Hardy Heron” (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS), “Dapper Drake” (Ubuntu 6.06 LTS) and “Hoary Hedgehog” (Ubuntu 5.04). Ubuntu 4.10 was probably happy to have been upgraded to a number after being called “Warty Warthog” during development.
Linux’s developers are no less imaginative. While Ubuntu called 7.04 “Feisty Fawn,” Linux used “Feisty Dunnart” to denote Linux Kernel 2.6.2. Other names have included “Colgate” for Red Hat Linux 4.0, “Darth Vader” for College Linux 2.3 and “Puberty”  for WOWLinux 6.2.

A Phoenix, a Firebird and The Considerable Duck

Not all open source names have been successful though. Firefox had to go through several name changes after running intro trademark issues. Phoenix Technologies objected to the project’s original title which might not have been too surprising. It was called “Phoenix.” But cold water was thrown over the second choice “Firebird” by the fellow open-sourcers of the Firebird free database software project. The Mozilla Foundation suggested “Mozilla Firebird” but Firebird’s developers weren’t happy until Mozilla opted for “Firefox” instead. Perhaps the browser-makers should have been more concerned about being mistaken for a defunct muscle car.

It’s GNOME though, a free Unix desktop, that wins the prize for best open source code name with “The Considerable Duck,” the moniker it used for the slightly less catchy GNOME 2.0.2 Desktop RC1.

Step into the corporate world and the code names start to get a little more dull. There’s a good reason for that. Code names have uses beyond letting developers smile at in-jokes. Because they’re supposed to keep the nature of a project secret, a code name that’s too linked to the project’s goals might reveal the company’s direction to competitors. They allow sub-projects to be broken off and given a new identity – one not linked to the failure of the main project. They prevent the public from confusing a bug-ridden pre-release from a fully-functional final version. And they can be leaked to the press to help create a media buzz during the development phase so they have to sound sensible.

It’s no surprise then that while computer clusters in corporations might be named after Twin Peaks characters or Japanese movie monsters, the names given to the products themselves tend to be a little less creative.

Intel, for example, tends to go for place names. Its development code names include “Brookdale” (Intel 845 series chipsets), which probably refers to a town in California, “Bulverde” (the PXA27x family of Xscale processors) and “Camino” (Intel 820 chipsets.) Things started to get a little more interesting when the company allowed developers to use place names in Israel and India, where it also has development centers. “Dothan,” the name of an ancient town in Israel, was used to refer to a version of the Pentium M which succeeded “Banias,” the name of an archaeological site on the Golan Heights.

Occasionally, Intel has also approved of names that are not geographical. “Kikayon,” the name of a plant mentioned in the Book of Jonah, was used to denote a version of the Intel Core processor, and “Boazman,” which referred to a gigabit Ethernet controller, is a Hebrew phrase that can mean “the time has come.” Intel might have regretted giving its developers so much freedom though when they called a 32 nm processor microarchitecture “Gesher.” Although that’s the unassuming Hebrew word for “bridge,” it was also the name of an Israeli political party. Intel later changed the code name to “Sandy Bridge.” Considering the speed with which Israeli political parties rise and fall though, Intel might need to produce alternative code names for all its development products.

Rivals AMD are equally systematic. The company’s K8 CPUs take their code names from cities around the world. The Phenom brand uses names of stars and its mobile platforms the names of birds. The developers of Opteron server CPUs and platforms are clearly a more exciting bunch though; they use cities linked to Ferrari.

Apple’s Big Cat Code Names

In general though, it seems that the cooler and more creative the company, the better the code names. Apple now tends to use the names of big, scary cats to denote its operating systems but the company hasn’t always been so aggressive. The Apple //c+ was oddly named “Adam Ant” after the 80s pop singer, and the Apple Power Macintosh 6100/60 was called “Piltdown Man” after a Paleolithic forgery consisting of a modern human skull and an orangutan’s jawbone. The name “Macintosh” itself derived from “McIntosh” just one code name in a series of types of apple that included “Cortland” (Apple llgs) and “Pippin” (Apple //c).

Nintendo also used some exciting names for its consoles during development. The GameCube used to be called “Dolphin,” the Game Boy Advance was known as “Atlantis” and the Nintendo 64 was named “Project Reality.” The Wii was called “Revolution” for more than a year before the marketing people decided a word normally associated with toilets would help it sell better.

But maybe it was a smart move. “Revolution” alerted the gaming world that something big was coming while “Wii” indicated that what came out was something that long-term players needed and found immensely satisfying.

So code names may be fun but they’re not always trivial. During the Second World War the Germans named a new radar system “Wotan” after a one-eyed god. R.V. Jones, a scientist at the British Air Ministry concluded that the name meant that system used a single beam, and was able to develop an effective countermeasure. May the creativity continue.

Photography: burienundressedblog

Create a product that becomes a fad, and you’re in for a sackload of money — for a while at least. For a few months, maybe a year if you’re lucky, you’ll wallow in media attention, see your name in every newspaper, field calls from Jon Stewart and perhaps even Oprah, and look goggle-eyed at your sales figures. And then it will all disappear. As quickly as the fad rocketed into the stratosphere, that’s the same speed at which it will crash into the ground. Suddenly, the phone will stop ringing, no one will want to talk to you, and if you’re making sales, it’s to asset-strippers hoping to make a few bucks off your desk. If you didn’t squirrel away your money during those boom times, you’ll be back where you started – minus one good idea. Create a product that turns into a trend though, and you’ll be set for life.

You won’t just have created an item that lots of people buy now. You’ll have started a fashion that lots of people will continue buying in the future. That means you’ll have to deal with competitors, copycats, pirates and me-too bandwagon-jumpers but because you’ll have been first, you’ll have the advantage. It’s much more demanding than selling a fad but it’s also much more stable and ultimately more rewarding. So what are the differences between fads and trends, and what can you do to turn your product from one to the other?

Fads Are a Load of Crocs

It used to be said that a fad starts in California, a trend in Connecticut. Crocs though, started in Canada then moved to Colorado. In 2007, the company made a profit of $168 million selling its range of plastic clogs. In 2008, that giant pile had become a $185 million loss. A third of the company’s workforce – some 2000 employees – have recently been given their marching orders.

Perhaps they should have seen it coming. Crocs had all the hallmarks of a fad: they were everywhere, suddenly; they divided opinion – either you loved them and wore them daily or you hated them and wondered why anyone would want to put rubber tubs on their feet; they were particularly popular with kids, a notoriously fickle market; and they tried to stay the same in the fashion world, an industry which has to bring out new product ranges every season.

Worse, the products themselves last almost forever so once you’ve bought one, there’s little reason to buy another one.

Crocs though did make money for a while, and they did try to move into a more stable revenue stream. (The company’s range of Croslite clothing didn’t do so well.) MySpace though is starting to show all the signs of faddiness without any of the big profits. The site, which already had 100 million accounts back in 2006 – a lifetime ago in Internet terms – has just laid off 30 percent of its workforce.

Like Crocs, MySpace is particularly popular with young audiences, but unlike Crocs, it’s tried to stay there. Instead of looking for ways to bring in older, more stable users – in the way that the slower-burning LinkedIn has done – it’s focused on bringing out emoticons, profile modules and most importantly, music. The result is that as the users have grown up, they’ve grown away, taking their advertising value with them. And they never bought anything either.

Compare MySpace though with YouTube, another social media site snapped up by a larger conglomerate but which appears to be on much more solid ground. While MySpace is shrinking, YouTube is the third most popular site on the Web, after Google and Yahoo!.

Faddy MySpace, Trendy YouTube

Part of that is down to need. No one needed rubber shoes, but those who bought them thought they looked cool… until they didn’t. MySpace grew at a time when there were few other options available for online social networking. But by staying the same and allowing Facebook to do social media so much better, no one who doesn’t own a guitar needs MySpace any longer.

YouTube was also born out of a need but it remains needed. The apocryphal story has founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen attending a dinner party then wondering how to share a video of the evening online. That might not be true but the methods of sharing online video were very limited at the time. There was a demand for YouTube before it existed, even if those demanding it didn’t quite realize what they wanted. And since its creation, YouTube has not only managed to adjust – creating channels, introducing advertising, and allowing publishers to place videos on their websites – it’s also allowed users to change the site too.

That’s crucial, and it’s one very valuable way in which fads become trends. Customers do get bored after a while. Deliver the same thing in exactly the same way time after time, and eventually those customers will stop buying. They’ll buy the next new thing instead – especially if it does the same thing better. Allow your customers to get creative with your product though, and you might just find that it has more uses and a longer life than you could have possibly imagined.

YouTube might have been invented to allow people to share their home videos but it took off – and revolutionized the media world – when people start using it to upload copyrighted professional content. It got a second lease of life when users started creating their own versions of those clips, and added an extra base when companies saw its viral marketing value.

While fads tend to have one use – which means the product disappears when that use is no longer wanted – trends are flexible enough to adjust to the market’s changing desires. So the iPhone, which was unique when it came out but now competes against a host of other smartphones, remains a trend because of the directions its app developers have taken it. Twitter too might have risen with the speed of a fad, but its flexibility, its range of uses that have extended so far beyond its original vision as a kind of public messaging system, and its giant list of apps and APIs, have made it into a trend that’s going to stay (as long as Biz Stone and Even Williams can figure out how to monetize it.)

If you’re wondering whether your product is going to be a fad or a trend then, ask yourself what it does. What needs does it fulfill? And what needs could it fulfill if you gave your customers the freedom to put it to new uses?

Last year, we released our twitter ebook as an introduction to using Twitter.  We could not have anticipated that our ebook would become one of the most downloaded Twitter ebooks or that Fortune 500 companies would be contacting us to include the ebook in their corporate intranets.  But what we DID anticipate is that Twitter would be a strong and viable business and marketing tool.  And so we assigned our entire writing and research staff to work towards releasing a Twitter business book. The result is 99 Ways To Make Money Using Twitter is now available on Amazon.

All the Most Effective Twitter Money-Making Strategies in One Place

The challenge in writing and researching a Twitter business book is to look at all the strategies, methods, and ways of making money on Twitter, and to bring them together into a book that is current, yet filled with case studies that will not go out of date. The methods range from one extreme to the other. We found authors who were selling their books with Twitter, and writers who were publishing their books on Twitter. We came across plenty of large firms using Twitter to improve their customer service, and one Twitter entrepreneur who was making almost $1500 a month helping CSS programmers in his spare time on Twitter. We found a bunch of different ways of inserting ads into a Twitter page – some more obtrusive than others – and users who were offering Twitter-based translation services, job listings, garage sales, retail outlets, giveaways, affiliate links, contests, directories, craft products and a whole bunch more.

Some of these methods were making money directly through sales, commissions, payments for services and more. Others acted as a branding tool, community builder or viral marketing channel that spread a company’s name and image further – and cheaper — than it could have done otherwise.

Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised to find that people were experimenting with Twitter in such creative ways and in so many different ways. But we wanted to be certain that these methods worked. It’s easy enough to come up with an idea. But implementing that idea and making sure that it’s as good in practice as it seemed in theory is a whole other ball game. As we researched each method then, we looked closely at how people were implementing it and tried to see what sort of results they were having. When we described that strategy in the book, we made sure that the chapter included at least one case study that would allow readers to see the method’s effectiveness for themselves — and copy it easily.

That ease of implementation was a guiding principle, and it governed the structure of the book. Twitter has turned out to be an incredibly flexible marketing tool, one that’s vital to companies the size of Comcast as much as to individual sellers looking to increase their website views or move a few more handmade items. What all of these users have in common though is that none of them wants to waste time trying to figure out how to make a method work, let alone decide whether it’s going to work at all.

From How It’s Done to Where to Begin

In each chapter then, we included an introduction that summarized the strategy we were about to describe. We added a short key that would function as a guide to the method’s difficulty, skill level and revenue potential. We then explained how twitterers were using the method, how anyone can do the same thing, pointed out where to begin, and added some advanced tips to ensure that anyone who used the method could skip from beginner to advanced user — and secure earner — right away. And finally, we made sure that we included a reference to a case study so that readers could look at the example in action for themselves.

Clearly not all of these methods are going to be suitable for every user of twitterer, just as not everyone is going to make money with a blog about gardening or an ebook about collecting porcelain dolls. That’s why it’s so important for people who are serious about using Twitter — and serious about making money online — to understand the breadth of the opportunities available. If you aren’t aware of just what Twitter can do — and what people are doing on the site — then you won’t be able to choose the methods that best suit you.

Among the Twitter documents stolen from the cloud by a French hacker and published recently by Techcrunch was a note with the question “Are we the new Internet?” That’s unlikely. Twitter is just one service which uses the Internet, but it does share the Internet’s flexibility and its earning potential too. Entrepreneurs, businesses, managers and everyone, in fact, needs to understand the range of the opportunity that Twitter offers so that they too can make the most of it – just as they need to understand the Internet if they want to stay in business.

Twitter now is where the Web was in the early years of this decade. The buzz has peaked and the first round of excitement is dying down. Now that the party is over, people are getting to work — and yes, they are starting to make money. In 99 Ways to Make Money Using Twitter, we attempt to reveal the most effective ways that users are making that money, and make it easy for others to do the same thing. You can pick up your copy of 99 Ways to Make Money Using Twitter exclusively at Amazon.

Photography: Ben McLeod

Working from home is a whole new way of working — a revolution in industry, in society, in the way we live. Or is it? While making a living by sitting in a café with a frappucino and a two-way link to the cloud might be something your parents never dreamed of doing, the idea that you can ignore the corporate world and earn from home is actually about as modern as iron horseshoes and knitting needles. In fact, not only are today’s home-based tech workers more traditional than the average cubicle drone, they actually have a long way to go before their numbers come close to those of the good old days despite recent trends.

According to the US Census Office, the number of people who work at home  more than two days a week increased between 1980 and 1990 by 56 percent from 2.2 million to 3.4 million.That’s a remarkable rise and one made all the more impressive by happening before the expansion of the Internet. In the decade following 1990, as communications improved and email replaced memos, the figures increased by a further 22.8 percent to reach 4.2 million people. By 2000, the Census Office reports, 3.3 percent of the working population was able to skip the commute for most of their workweek.

When One in Fourteen Worked from Home

But those are still significantly lower than the numbers in 1960 when almost 4.7 million people were earning their keep from home – a full 7.2 percent of the population. That number halved over the following twenty years, a decline which the Census Office puts down primarily to the closure of family farms and the movement of doctors and other professionals away from home offices and towards large shared practices.

But it wasn’t just the last of the small farmers and home-visiting doctors who were able to call their homes their workspaces in the 1960s. Some of the most important contributions to American culture were being produced in home offices even before the era of free love and one-way commutes to Southeast Asia.

Pay a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s home in Oak Park, Illinois, for example, and you’ll be able to see not just the house in which the creator of the Prairie style lived from 1889-1909 but also the office in which he designed 125 of the country’s most important structures. Nor was his own home just a workplace. It was also an architectural laboratory on which he tested his design concepts and theories. Most home workers work in their house. Frank Lloyd Wright’s house was also his work.

That a creative professional like an architect should be able to avoid an office building is perhaps not surprising. Designers, painters, sculptors and other arty types tend to work alone, relying on their own inspiration to deliver their ideas. They rarely need the kinds of equipment that’s best supplied by large office buildings and having secretaries, assistants, sales staff and watercoolers around might even be distracting. Around 40 percent of artists are believed to work from home studios – or at least they do until children come along and claim the studio as their bedroom.

The Web’s Work from Home Industrial Revolution

According to the 1990 census though, almost half of all home workers were in the service industries, which included business and repair work,  entertainment and recreation, and “other professional and related services.” By 2000, 1.9 million people were providing “professional services” from home – by far the most popular category – but there were also more than 42,000 people preparing food professionally in their own kitchens and over half a million cutting hair, giving massages and  delivering other kinds of personal care. Interestingly, almost 5,000 people in the fishing, hunting and forestry professions worked from home at the start of the millennium too. You have to wonder about the size of their yards.

Even this variety might not be anything new. Perhaps the most important characteristic of the Industrial Revolution was the movement to cities as factories became the shared workspaces of a new urban working class. But what were those new proletarians doing before the opening of the mills and the invention of automated looms that could fill factory floors and lop off children’s fingers? Some, as in early twentieth century America, would have been driving horses on farms but others would have been crafting from home. For women in particular, the loss of hand looms to the spinning jenny meant a shift away from home and family to cotton mills and hard-nosed bosses. For men too, the rise of the assembly line marked the end of the kind of sweating, hammering and hand-crafting of unreliable quality that could be done in a home workshop.

Interestingly, Peter Sweeney, Founder & CTO of semantic technology firm Primal Fusion, has described Web 3.0 as the Internet’s own industrial revolution, a time when the social connections of Web 2.0 gives way to the automated production of content. Wolfram Alpha, he says, is one example of the way in which information can be produced automatically and without the kind of work-at-home handicraft that predated Dickens and which now characterizes the Web’s co-working content producers.

That sounds unlikely. Easy communication is only going to increase the return to home-working and recession hit tech-types who have spent the last few months consulting from home will take some persuading to get back to the traffic jams when the economy does pick up. But today’s home-workers are now primarily tapping keyboards rather than driving tractors. They’re in the cities rather than in the dust fields of Oklahoma (although many of them, like those former agriculturalists, are also now in California). And unlike independent spinners and weavers, they find that they can compete easily with the productivity levels of factory and office-based employees.

Working from home then isn’t a new way of working. It’s a return to an old, traditional – and more enjoyable — way of working, and don’t let the Luddites tell you otherwise.

Photography: Sacca

Meet a geek with a good idea, and you can almost see the swimming pool, palm trees and pina coladas in his eyes. But talk to him and you’ll often find that plans for living the high life are only a few months deep. Once the long hours have been recovered and the mansion bought, most tech-type entrepreneurs want to be known for more than their invention and certainly more than the deepness of their tan. They often want to use their money to change the world too.

That’s not new, of course. Those with more money than they can spend have long been inclined to give it away, often in return for seeing their name on the hospital wall. In Slate 60’s list of the top philanthropic donors of 2008, only Michael Bloomberg at number nine (with a $235 million donation) made money with technology, and you have to drop another two places before you reach Richard Weiland, one of the founders of Microsoft. He donated just over $174 million in 2008. The bulk of the money on Slate’s donor list though came from finance, real estate, investments and other traditional industries and a full eight of last year’s top eleven private donations though came in the form of bequests.

Bill Gates is Alive and Giving

Bill Gates at least had the generosity to give away most of his fortune while he’s still alive. Helped by Warren Buffett’s contribution, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gets to manage an endowment of $35 billion, sharing the loot between global health initiatives, global development programs and the United States, particularly in the area of education.

Gates has practically been around long enough to be considered “old money” — in tech terms at least. Slightly newer and no less generous is Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. Listed as the 156th richest person in the world, Omidyar owns over $2.6 billion worth of eBay shares. His Omidyar Network has already committed some $270 million to a range of philanthropic causes.

Clearly though, it’s easy to dig deep once you’ve already cashed in. So what’s happening with those on the way up? How generous are the newer entrants to the tech world to those in need of more than a lava lamp.

Google’s slogan doesn’t promise much. “Do no evil” might sound like an upgraded version of the Hippocratic oath but it doesn’t say that the search giant is planning to do any good either. In fact, the company, as well as its founders, have been quietly busy handing out cash to good causes. Google.org, Google’s charitable side, has already committed over $100 million in grants and investments, much of it to develop clean energy, improve global health and enhance information access. Makani Power, for example, received a $15 million investment to support research on high-altitude wind energy. Aptera Motors and ActaCell netted $2.75 million to help develop technologies to be used in plug-in electric vehicles. And the Seva Foundation received $2 million to support programs to prevent blindness and restore eyesight in India, Nepal, Tibet, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Egypt, Tanzania and Guatemala.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s two founders who are each estimated to be worth about $18.5 billion, are themselves no slouches when it comes to philanthropy. Brin’s family foundation runs assets of $103.5 million and he himself donated $106 million between 2002 and 2006. Page handed out $135 million in that period, and his family foundation handles $134.4 million.

Facebook for Good

It’s when you move on to the newest forms of Web 2.0 that the hands stop reaching the bottom of the pockets. That’s perhaps not too surprising. Social media and the collaborative Internet are new enough for the money to be still under construction rather than piling up in bank accounts waiting for someone to figure out what to do with it all. And often, it’s not being made at all.

Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable donations, for example, aren’t being reported but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s made some. We can understand though if he hasn’t. This year, Zuckerberg’s fortune was said to have dropped below $1 billion so he’s probably been busy watching the pennies.

His website though has been making efforts to give back. Facebook for Good is a page dedicated to helping Facebook fans “[s]hare your stories about how Facebook has helped you give back to your communities, effect change or connect with a distant relative.” Stories contributed include the moving tale of a lost cat which was reunited with its owner after two years thanks to social networking, a post about Facebook acting as matchmaker to a couple that had met in summer camp as teenagers then got back together after finding each other online, and a description of how cops can use the site to catch criminals. More effectively, Facebook has also made a number of virtual gifts available for members to buy each other. Between 90-95 percent of the fee will benefit sixteen charity/advocacy groups. The remainder will be spent on administration rather than on enhancing Facebook’s profits. Or creating some.

Creating ways for members to give to charity though is not the same as giving to charity yourself. But it is popular and for Web 2.0 companies with lots of spirit and little spare cash, it’s a pretty good option. Tech blog Mashable is currently hosting the Summer of Social Good, using the power of social media to raise money for a bunch of good causes, including The Humane Society, Oxfam, WWF and the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Again, they’re not dipping into their funds themselves but they are donating time and effort, and that’s a kind of money too.

And what about the newest boys on the Web 2.0 block? There’s no sign that Twitter has donated anything yet, but there’s no sign that it’s made anything either. (A few “sponsored definitions” will only go so far.) But for a service that’s only been around for two years, it’s already spawned Twestival, which raised enough money for 55 water projects in Ethiopia, Uganda and India, and almost brought down a despotic regime in the Middle East.

Now that’s changing the world.