Even the most slovenly of brains are con­stantly solv­ing prob­lems. We look for ways to make our lives eas­ier, to make our­selves hap­pier, to make our­selves richer or even just to pass the time. We all solve prob­lems all day, every day. Our brains are churn­ing out novel solu­tions to every­day prob­lems in every wak­ing moment. For some of us,

There’s only one dif­fer­ence between entre­pre­neurs and the rest of the world. To sum it up in 10 words:
Entre­pre­neurs don’t just have ideas. They bring them to life.

Next time you won­der what the dif­fer­ence is between you and the next young mil­lion­aire (or bil­lion­aire), I want you to stop pre­tend­ing you don’t know the answer. It’s sim­ple: every­one has ideas, but entre­pre­neurs make their ideas into real­ity. Now stop read­ing Red­dit, stop watch­ing TV, stop play­ing games and get out there and build something.

In the past, I’ve extolled the virtues of work­ing with a pen and paper to enhance cre­ativ­ity. I’m a firm believer that get­ting offline and giv­ing your­self some room to be cre­ative beyond the key­board is a great way to dis­cover and develop new ideas.

I prac­tice what I preach, and over the past few months I’ve been using a cheap ruled note­book for this very pur­pose. But this cheap note­book which is on hand wher­ever I go, so it some­how seems to get used for every­thing from meet­ing notes to shop­ping lists. The sim­ple util­ity of always car­ry­ing a pen and paper has in itself man­aged to detract from my cre­ative process. Now when I try to get inspired, I have to trawl through page-upon-page of scrib­blings about other menial tasks and irrel­e­vant notes which seem to end up dis­tract­ing me from my imme­di­ate goals.

This prob­lem was a sim­ple one to solve: get a new note­book which will be used purely for busi­ness ideas and inno­va­tion, and carry both note­books around with me.

The note­book I chose for this pur­pose is the won­der­ful Mole­sk­ine Pocket Ruled Note­book. Con­sid­er­ing this is essen­tially “just” a note­book, I can’t over­state the sim­ple beauty that Mole­sk­ines offer. The form fac­tor is stun­ning. The hefty 192 pages have a won­der­ful weight to them, as well as being lined and acid-free. The note­book also has a rib­bon place­holder, elas­tic strap to hold the note­book shut, and a back pocket to hold any loose slips of paper.

Buy­ing such a beau­ti­ful note­book has helped me out in more ways than one. Now I have a ded­i­cated space for creativity—something I find myself treat­ing as an hal­lowed, almost sacred object. I wouldn’t dare use it for any­thing other than the intended pur­pose. Plus the pages are thread bound, so any temp­ta­tion to rip them out when I write down some­thing rub­bish is dra­mat­i­cally reduced.

I’ve decided to use the Mole­sk­ine as a library of busi­ness ideas. When­ever I think of a poten­tial busi­ness propo­si­tion, I turn to the next free double-page in the note­book and write as much or as lit­tle as comes to mind. I leave the full double-page ded­i­cated to that sin­gle idea, move the rib­bon place­holder to the next page, and close the book.

This process is slowly but surely pro­vid­ing me with a beau­ti­ful repos­i­tory of raw poten­tial. When­ever I want some inspi­ra­tion, I have pages of oppor­tu­ni­ties to browse. Each time I do, it seems inevitable that I come up with new addi­tions and thoughts which can be noted against each cen­tral idea. In time, I expect that this book will be full of such a vari­ety of ideas (some won­der­ful, some ter­ri­ble) that start­ing a side busi­ness is almost inevitable!

The point I’m try­ing to make is a sim­ple one: cre­ativ­ity is impor­tant, but so is respect for your ideas. Treat­ing inspi­ra­tion with rev­er­ence beyond a quick scrib­ble will help you to build a bank of great ideas with real potential—and doing so in a book you can be proud to carry will only make the process eas­ier. Invest in ideas today. You’ll thank me in the future.

How do you cap­ture your win­ning ideas and make sure you don’t for­get them for­ever? Do you have a great process for refin­ing them over time? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Snow­fall is a fairly reg­u­lar occur­rence. In the UK we are graced by snow for around 10 days per year. Fewer days of snow may affect those near the coast, or many more may affect those in the Pen­nines, but it is a safe bet that you will enjoy a nice coat­ing of snow for at least a few days per year.

The reac­tions to snow are mixed. For some, they fear the has­sle it brings: dis­rup­tion to travel, to deliv­er­ies, and to daily rou­tine. It brings wet car­pets and cold ears; school clo­sures and icy pave­ments; slip­pery sur­faces and soggy train­ers. For oth­ers, snow is a bless­ing. It brings snow­balls and sledg­ing; qual­ity time with the kids; days free from the com­mute and free from the office. And for many, it means a day off. But just because it dis­rupts rou­tine, why should it destroy productivity?

Snow seems to be the only form of weather which can reli­ably bring British busi­ness to its knees. After the recent snow, absence man­age­ment orga­ni­za­tion First­Care esti­mated that nearly 11 per cent of the UK work­force stayed at home—the high­est fig­ure ever recorded for Decem­ber. Mean­while, The Cen­tre for Eco­nom­ics and Busi­ness Research esti­mated that this spell of absen­teeism costs us over £1 bil­lion per day. That’s over 26% of Britain’s daily GDP.

The key ques­tion for me is not why 11% of the UK work­force stays at home, but why stay­ing at home car­ries such a high cost to busi­nesses. Why does a lit­tle snow (or even a lot of snow) cost us 13% of our daily GDP?

In 2009, it was esti­mated that 73% of the UK GDP came from the ser­vices sec­tor. In today’s world, ser­vices means far more than tourism and trans­port: it also means finance and busi­ness ser­vices, many of which are essen­tially vir­tual. What do I mean by “vir­tual” ser­vices? I’m refer­ring to ser­vices which at their core do not directly relate to phys­i­cal prod­ucts or the move­ment of mate­ri­als. They relate to con­cepts, to ideas and to impor­tant infor­ma­tion, yet they do not require a phys­i­cal back­drop. These are ser­vices like account­ing, adver­tis­ing, design, pro­gram­ming and sup­port. To an extent, even tele­sales, recruit­ment and many real estate ser­vices fall into this category.

ONS sta­tis­tics show that even in 2000, over 10 mil­lion peo­ple were employed in vir­tual sec­tor jobs against a back­drop of over 25 mil­lion work­ers employed within the wider ser­vices sec­tor. The vir­tual sec­tor makes up approx­i­mately a third of the UK work­force, yet accounts for closer to half of UK GDP. In today’s cli­mate (both mete­o­ro­logic and eco­nomic), surely the over­whelm­ing major­ity of vir­tual sec­tor should be able to work from home and reduce the cost of snowfall?

There are plenty of exam­ples of how com­pa­nies can func­tion even while staff work from home, and plenty more exam­ples of com­pa­nies fail­ing to think ahead. I’m going to pick out two.

I’ll start with a soft­ware house in Oxford at which many of my friends are employed. When their offices are snow­bound or employ­ees are faced with a rather slip­pery uphill strug­gle to get to work, they are all pro­vided with myr­iad sen­si­ble ways to work from home. For some, this is as sim­ple as using the same lap­top at home as at work. For oth­ers, it is cen­tred on good, thor­ough doc­u­men­ta­tion and a reliance on free, open source soft­ware. Sen­si­ble email access poli­cies allow users to get set-up from home, and employ­ees are pro­vided with secure access to the com­pany intranet through use of free, multi-platform, open source soft­ware like PuTTY. Because the com­pany base so much of their oper­a­tion on open source soft­ware, employ­ees can freely install almost any of the other tools they need to do almost all of their work from home. It’s not ideal, but it’s prag­matic and allows for solid pro­duc­tiv­ity even in the worst con­di­tions. All they need is inter­net access.

Let’s take a rather less impres­sive case: Ebuyer, the online elec­tron­ics super­store. Snow hits, and their deliv­er­ies take a hit—something which is per­fectly under­stand­able given the loca­tion of their offices in East York­shire. How­ever, not only do their deliv­er­ies strug­gle, but so do their tele­phone lines. When the snow came down in early Decem­ber, their tele­phone lines were closed for days and email enquiries received very lim­ited responses. This was appar­ently because their staff could not make it to the sup­port cen­tre. But why did staff need to be in the cen­tre to work?

There are many free or cheap solu­tions to route tele­phone calls that do not require a phys­i­cal ded­i­cated line hooked up to each hand­set, and indeed vir­tu­ally every call cen­tre already uses these. There are also plenty of good and cheap solu­tions for rout­ing calls over IP. As for remote email access: this is just a given in the mod­ern world, and all it takes is for a plan to be in place. Could staff not have been pro­vided in advance with a spare head­set and any required doc­u­men­ta­tion to allow them to sign-on and work from home? Per­haps this is impos­si­ble with the sys­tems that Ebuyer have in place, but with a lit­tle prior plan­ning and good choice of tech­nol­ogy it seems very unlikely that the prob­lem could not have been avoided.

The key point is that with a lit­tle prepa­ra­tion and a lit­tle tech­nol­ogy there is almost always a way to allow vir­tual sec­tor employ­ees to be work from home. There are so many solu­tions which are already in use for this very purpose—an increas­ing num­ber of which are already in your IT infra­struc­ture, are freely avail­able, or can be cheaply deployed from the cloud. This is a solved prob­lem from the tech­no­log­i­cal stand­point. Con­nec­tiv­ity is not an issue even over great dis­tances, and band­width is largely free for con­sumers, so why not make use of it? Why are we still left to floun­der when the snow settles?

This is a call to arms. Man­age­ment: get pre­pared, talk to your sys­tem admin­is­tra­tors in the New Year, and make this hap­pen. It might require a lit­tle effort and a lit­tle will, but it can be done and will deliver huge sav­ings to your busi­ness even in the medium term.

Every­one else: go out­side and make the most of the snow while you can. This time next year you might find your­self not skiv­ing and sledg­ing, but work­ing from home. At least you’ll get to skip the commute…