Filed under Quotes

9-2-5

“Adding more hours to the workday does not correlate one-to-one with higher productivity. Working overtime is unsustainable in anything but the very short term. And working a lot of overtime creates a level of burnout that sets in far sooner, is far more acute, and requires much more to fix than most bosses or workers think it does. (..) Research shows that knowledge workers actually have fewer good hours in a day than manual laborers do — on average, about six hours, as opposed to eight.”

Why We Have to Go Back to a 40-Hour Work Week to Keep Our Sanity

Google+

“Officially, Google declared that “sharing is broken on the web” and nothing but the full force of our collective minds around Google+ could fix it. (…) As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.”

James Whittaker

“It turns out Google+ is a virtual ghost town compared with the site of rival Facebook Inc., which is preparing for a massive initial public offering. (…) Google executives downplay the direct comparison to Facebook, which has 845 million monthly active users. (…) Mr. Horowitz declined to share data about how much time people spend on Google+ but said we’re growing by every metric we care about.

WSJ: The Mounting Minuses at Google+

“Google+ is designed to power ad targeting, and for that it only needs you to sign up once. This lets it combine the biographical information you initially enter such as age, gender, education, employers, and places you’ve lived with your activity on Search, Gmail, Maps and all its other products to create an accurate identity profile. And this powers targeting of more relevant ads it can charge more for. (…) n’t it curious that Google+ doesn’t actually show you any ads? It’s because the time-on-site and page views there are trivial. Hit the road, Jack. Don’t you ever come back and post an update, upload a photo, or add anyone to your Circles. It doesn’t matter. What’s important to Google is getting your biographical data. That’s why Google founder Larry Page said that by baking identity into all of our products…you’ll have better, more relevant search results and ads.

TC: Why Google+ Doesn’t Care If You Never Come Back

Minimalism in 2012

Wall

Wall by cjc4454 on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

“The marginal value of the last hour put into a business idea is usually much less than the first. The world is full of ideas that can be executed with 10 to 20 hours per week, let alone 40. The number of projects that are truly impossible unless you put in 80 or 120 hours per week are vanishingly small by comparison.”

David Heinemeier Hansson

“We must recover our sanity where 100 million users does not represent the goal criteria of every new service. We must recover the mindset where a service used by 10,000 users, or 1,000 users, or 100 users is *admired, respected, and praised* for its actual success.”

Ben Ward