A Compelling Story

What makes a compelling story, I should ask. At the base of it, it ought to stir emotions, because without stirring emotions, a story does not compel one to act. Pretty much like reading a recipe of how to make french fries. Quite different from describing a food that would "bleed caramel (sic)".

An interesting read today -  at Tech Crunch - an article titled, To Successfully Launch a Product, You Have to Tell a Compelling Story! In essence, the article compared the 3 stories being told by Apple, Samsung and Microsoft with their recent product launches. You can read about it there.

As to other things in life, I think it is a good reminder that when  we put in a lot of effort in developing a product, a new way, an improve, we must tell a story that attracts the audience.

In attracting the audience, we must not only make sense, but also stir emotions. Then only it becomes a compelling story, one that compels the audience to experience that product and becomes an advocate of the product.

P/S. You may also be interested in the Elevator Pitch.

Safe consumption of medication! Coffee and Aspirin

i woke up with a headache this morning and even though I thought nothing of it, the headache persisted and I remain uncomfortable up to know. At 2 pm, i took 2 Uphamol tabletsha, (paracetamol) with half a glass of water.

I had to do some waiting (Saturday and all) so I wanted to have coffee while I wait.  I thought that it might be dangerous to consume coffee too close to consuming paracetamol.

First time I googled for answers, notthing seemed relevant. Which means, on www, it is quite safe to consume coffee after a few minutesnof consuming paracetamol.

A google again on "Lag between coffee and aspirin"  revealed that aspirin may work quicker with coffee. don't take my word for it, check it out at Wikihow

We get by on 25% productivity

It is quite interesting to find out how much time AT work we truly managed to spend ON work. This is not to say that there is anything terribly wrong with what an average person does. After all, work required still gets done.

Steve Pavlina (well, he is on the Net, so I can quote him), reckons that "Studies have shown that the average office worker does only 1.5 hours of actual work per day. The rest of the time is spent socializing, taking coffee breaks, eating, engaging in non-business communication, shuffling papers, and doing lots of other non-work tasks. The average full-time office worker doesn't even start doing real work until 11:00am and begins to wind down around 3:30pm."

Hmm, there is lunch in between, but let's just believe the studies.

Tomaz Mencinger thinks he is 25% productive. Read more at Pick The Brain.com. His day in question was:

"We can then divide our productive time by the total time available to calculate our productivity in percentage form.

For example, today I started work at 9:30 and I am finishing this article at around 11:30.

For this system to work, you need to be brutally honest. If I am, then in my two hours of available work, I spent around 40 minutes writing this post and about 20 minutes answering emails related to my business.

The other 60 minutes I spent time chatting with two friends on Skype, reading emails not related to my work , and reading internet marketing news not crucial to my business.

My productivity then was 60 minutes of work / 120 minutes of available time = 50%

When I do this again in the evening, I then realize that my daily productivity was maybe only 25%.

I have now measured my productivity and realized the painful truth: I spent only 25% of my available time working towards my goals and wasted the rest of my time doing unimportant things."

There are two take-aways from this short point:

(1) If there is a tool that actually allow the employer to get back say, an additional 5 minutes, for the employee to do actual work or to buy in more into the employer ethos, that would increase the productivity by 5.5%. Not bad ya.

(2) If a boss sees an employee busy in the office for more than 1.5 hours, be thankful, that's a net gain!