I am not about to make the arrogant proclamation that todays youth are more skilled and knowledgeable that the older population. I do think it is pertinent to look at today’s workplace for the answer as to why the youth are more productive than the elder generations. I see two things that the younger generations are doing in greater numbers than the elder generations:

1. There exists no fear of learning and embracing new tools and technology amongst today’s youth.
2. Today’s youth are better equipped with the skills they need to perform their jobs.

No Fear

When I say that today’s youth has no fear on adopting new tools and technology, I am really talking about hesitation. If the elder generations truly did fear such things, then new tools would never get made.* What I am saying though is that older generations are much slower to adopt new tools and tech, and it is for this reason that they fail to yield the benefit of these tools (and at time succeed in hedging risk in using them).

By the time the elder generation decides to give a new tool or tech a ‘go’ they are already far behind everyone else. Yes, they can learn and play catch up, but this is not the same as being an original user. When you meet someone who has been using Photoshop since day 1, or Windows, a Mac, installing Plumbing – their knowledge set will simply be to vast for any one person to learn in a reasonable period of time.

Original users (people doing it since day 1) have watched their tools and technology change and used those changes one at a time. If you started using a software program when it only had 20 features, then kept using it as they added 20 more each year you would easily know all the features and how best to use them. A person just picking up the software 5 years after you started using it, would have to know 100 features – all at once.

The bar to entry every time you hesitate keeps getting higher and higher.

More Skills

This is tricky because there are plenty of people out, older than me, that have a far greater skill set for the work that I do. However, there is no denying that if you place a random sample of 50+ year olds in a room and a random sample of 18–25 year olds in a room, the youth will out type the older people. The younger generations have grown up using a computer keyboard right away, they know QWERTY, they learned while they were learning to talk.

There is only a three year difference between my younger sister and I, yet there is a vast difference in our skill sets. For the most part we share no common interests, I am a geek, she, well she is not. However, she can text someone with her phone in her pocket (I have even seen her do this on the iPhone – I have no clue how), when I attempt the same task I end up calling someone. The difference is that 3 years: texting became popular when she was still in high school, while I was in college learning to be cool by using social networking. She is faster at texting, and I know social networking better.

Closing the Gap

When I first started in Property Management I made a ton of changes to the way our office runs. I infused technology everywhere possible, eliminated paper as much as I could. I tried to automate everything that I could afford to automate and in that first year of these sweeping changes I realized that I failed to ask one critical question before I changed something. I failed to ask: “Why do we do it this way?” If you don’t know why then you should never change something. Coming up on five years since I made those changes we still do some things the way that they were done before me (we changed some things back) because I did not understand why things were done the way they are when I tried to change them. This was a critical mistake I made, one that I have learned from.

My advice to all people – young and old – is to remember that just because something is not done the way you think it should be done, does not mean that it is being done wrong. We need to find out why it is being done a particular way.

We have a lot that to learn from each other, and a lot to teach each other. Don’t be afraid to do either.

*Yes they would.

“Sixty percent of respondents to the Microsoft Telework survey — conducted among 3,600 employees in 36 cities nationwide — say they are actually more productive and efficient when working remotely,” Microsoft says today said in a summary of the findings. “With less time spent commuting and fewer cubicle ‘drive bys’ causing distractions, respondents say, more time can be spent on the task in front of them.”

Also they just want to make sure they can keep working from home.

via Workers say they’re more productive away from office.

via Mac.AppStorm.

When you’re done with something, put it away. Right away. Clutter arises when we take something out, use it for awhile and neglect to return it to its proper home. Remember the Unclutterer’s gospel, “A place for everything, and everything in its place.”

I cannot tell you how amazing this tip is. I was always in awe when I walked into peoples homes and they looked immaculate. Sure they could have just straightened up before they had me over, but I always wanted my home to look that way perpetually.

In our home we have started enacting the above rule, that simple tip took us from spending Saturday afternoons cleaning the condo, to an hour a week doing cleaning. Just putting things back when you are done with them leads to so much less clutter and filth in your home. I cannot  recommend this tip enough.

via Unclutterer.

Typically I go to the store, run errands, shop online, play games, read news, anything that I want — just so long as I am doing something. The stillness of staring at a monitor, or a blank page is makes me not want to do something even more. The more I stare, the more paralyzed I become, instead I ditch it. Walk away and do something else.

We can all go and do something else, even if we have bosses. Go to the bathroom, make a copy, chat with a co-worker – anything that gets your mind back into the now. After you have worked to get your mind off the task take a look at it again, with a fresh perspective.

I am a all for stopping with work for the day when I hit a brick wall. I am aware that most people can’t do this, and for those of you who cannot just leave for the day I have a work around: Do busy work.

Busy work is great for days when we hit a wall, it is easy, time consuming, and requires no creativity. When you are stuck, busy work is what you should be turning to. Respond to emails, organize, file, fill out forms, these are all great ways to pass the day. There are tons of things to do and try to help jumpstart your creativity, I prefer to let it flow naturally (when I can). Of course there are times when you don’t have that luxury, but for the times when you can wait, why not do busy work? When we are in a creative zone having to do busy work will kill it, I prefer to try and get all of the busy work done when I am not in a creative zone.

To recap:

• Stop work
• Get your mind off of work
• Take a look with fresh eyes
• If step 3 fails do busy work

Rabbi Elijah of Vilna once said, “What we create becomes meaningful to us only once we stop creating it and start to think about why we did so.” The implication is clear. We could live lives that produce countless widgets, but we won’t start living until we stop producing and start enjoying. Capture again the lost practice of resting one day each week and start truly living.

via Zen Habits.

People always underestimate the amount of time it will take to do something. Even though I have timed myself enough to know how long it actually takes me to do something, I still think I work faster than I do. We all think this way. In our minds, we have speed of pumas.

via Unclutterer.

The right approach is more important than the tool.

via YouTube.

We trust everyone who works with us, and we know well enough that being overbearing and nosey does absolutely nothing for productivity. The irony is that office hours have nothing to do with the individual – it’s about the group, the sum of the parts, and having that group evolve from a bunch of people who know and work with one another into a team that actually wants to talk.

This is in response to how thier office used to work. In short they used to follow this mantra of 37signals, from Jason Fried:

Employees come to the office if and when they feel like it, or else they work from home. I don’t believe in the 40-hour workweek, so we cut all that BS about being somewhere for a certain number of hours. I have no idea how many hours my employees work — I just know they get the work done.

I think this is a discussion that we have not heard the last of, with the younger generation starting to assume more power I think this is going to be a two camp system, one for office hours and one against. Very few will be in the middle.

I don’t know exactly how MetaLab is working the new office hours, but I would assume that everyone needs to be in the office for those 2 hours. This is not a very good idea in my opinion. For one it eliminates the ability to hire people from around the world, taking your potential talent pool from 6 billion to 330 million (if you are in the U.S.).

I might propose office hours where everyone needs to be available on something like Campfire for that time.  Let me know your thoughts via Twitter or email.

via MetaLab.

Whichever you prefer, if your task manager is one of these, you can now turn emails in Postbox directly into tasks (with a link back to the original message in the notes). It’s not a new concept to Mail.app users, but it’s been something that many people who’ve switched to Postbox (or are thinking about it) have sorely missed.

As state this has always been possible with Mail.app, but it is great to see the integration happening with other apps.

via Postbox adds Things and OmniFocus support.