I was recently in Edin­burgh for the 2011 Hog­manay cel­e­bra­tions, and while was there I got the chance to visit The Scotch Whisky Expe­ri­ence. As well as a les­son on whisky-making, a tast­ing ses­sion, and a bar with over three hun­dred whiskys, the expe­ri­ence also plays host to The Dia­geo Claive Vidiz Scotch Whisky Collection.

The col­lec­tion is the largest Scotch whisky col­lec­tion in the world, and it is absolutely stun­ning. Here’s a pho­to­graph I took of some of the beau­ti­ful bot­tles on display.

Like whisky? Check out The Whisky Exchange for a large selec­tion of deli­cious sin­gle malts.

I make a lot of inter­na­tional calls at work to US clients and prospects. Unfor­tu­nately, many of the calls are to dif­fer­ent peo­ple in dif­fer­ent cities. I’m not yet at a point where I asso­ciate par­tic­u­lar US area codes with their time­zones (nor coun­try codes with time­zones for that mat­ter), and to be hon­est I’m not sure if I ever want to be that famil­iar with them.

My process used to be labo­ri­ous: visit Ben­net Yee’s Area Code List­ing, by Num­ber and look up the state to which the area code cor­re­sponds, visit Wikipedia and look up the cap­i­tal city of the state, then visit the World Clock Meet­ing Plan­ner and see how our time­zones over­lap. This got old pretty fast.

I’ve solved this prob­lem with Sun­dial, a US tele­phone num­ber to time­zone con­verter. It’s a sim­ple web­ser­vice which takes any old tele­phone num­ber and, if it’s a US num­ber, pro­duces a time­zone com­par­i­sion chart to show how it cor­re­sponds to GMT. Sun­dial is freely avail­able for pub­lic use, so please give it a try!

You can use Sun­dial in a few dif­fer­ent ways. The sim­plest is to visit the Sun­dial con­verter and enter a US tele­phone num­ber that you would like to lookup. For­mat is not important—stick it in with brack­ets, peri­ods, warts and all. Alter­na­tively, to con­vert Mobile: (651) 342.2323 you can just nav­i­gate directly to http://benjaminasmith.com/tools/sundial/Mobile: (651) 342.2323 and get the answer you’re look­ing for.

My favourite way to use Sun­dial is via Fire­fox Smart Key­words. Using smart key­words, I can just type:

sun Mobile: 651.342.2323

To set this up, just cre­ate a new book­mark to http://benjaminasmith.com/tools/sundial/%s and give it the key­word sun.

Sun­dial is still under devel­op­ment, so I’d love to hear any sug­ges­tions you might have or fix any bugs you might come across. Let me know how you get on in the com­ments, or drop me an email.

As I tweeted yes­ter­day morn­ing, I have only one res­o­lu­tion for 2011: work hard, and get rewarded. Per­haps it sounds more like a mantra than a goal, but I think it has a lot of value.

Through­out our lives, we work. We work for sat­is­fac­tion, for pay­ment, for food and for shel­ter. Some of us work for some­thing to do. Most of us work because we have to. Very few of us stay at home and do noth­ing all day; even after retire­ment, plenty of peo­ple con­tinue to work in one form or another. Our lives are bound up in work. It can be joy­ous or crush­ing. It can make the rest of our lives easy, or leave us liv­ing from pay­check to paycheck.

The key to work, and to life, is to throw your­self into it and to get rewarded for doing so. Ide­al­is­tic? Sure. But I believe that it’s true, too.

When I talk about rewards, I don’t just mean cash. Sure, I want to make a few extra quid as much as any­one else; in fact, one of my goals this year is to orga­nize my finances and get started in the world of invest­ment. But rewards come in many guises, not least of which is job sat­is­fac­tion. There’s lit­tle bet­ter than com­ing home from a long day with the feel­ing of a job well done, of value, of worth, of know­ing that your boss appre­ci­ates your work—and so do you. I want both kinds of reward: finan­cial and emotional.

But how can the desire to be rewarded fit in to the cat­e­gory of “New Year’s Res­o­lu­tion”? We have some mea­sure of con­trol over our job sat­is­fac­tion, but surely the level of finan­cial reward is a deci­sion for our employ­ers alone to make? I couldn’t dis­agree more.

First of all, never for­get that your job and your salary are not for­ever fixed. A hard worker is valu­able to their employer, what­ever cat­e­gory they fall into, and you should always make sure that you’re paid what you’re worth. That said, this of course requires that you are a hard worker. But beyond this, if you stay with your cur­rent job then think about find­ing ways to take on more respon­si­bil­ity. Be more involved. Be more impor­tant. Work harder, be appre­ci­ated, and when the salary review comes around you’ve got a great bar­gain­ing chip to get your­self a raise.

If your job doesn’t inter­est you, that’s fine: do some­thing on the side! You can work hard at any­thing from a side busi­ness to a stu­dent soci­ety. You can vol­un­teer some time for a local char­ity or a non-profit organ­i­sa­tion. You can start a blog, or become an ama­teur pho­tog­ra­pher. There pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less, and impor­tantly, each one has the poten­tial for both emo­tional and finan­cial reward. I’m not the first to talk about mak­ing more money from side projects and I won’t be the last.

So what’s the plan? I’ve writ­ten myself three key messages.

1. Work hard in your day job, and get a good raise at your annual salary review.
   This will keep me focused, keep my job sat­is­fac­tion at a high level, help me progress through the com­pany, and will ulti­mately make my daily life more reward­ing. To boot, any increase I can get when the salary review comes around will ulti­mately stand me in good stead for the future: raises have resid­ual ben­e­fits and will boost your income for many years to come.
2. Stop being lazy when it comes to per­sonal finance.
   Last year I let my sav­ings sit in a 0% inter­est account because I didn’t get around to start­ing a new one. I let a Cred­i­t­Ex­pert trial run on for months after I’d checked my score because I couldn’t be both­ered to can­cel it, wast­ing almost £50. No more. This year, I’m going to just get on with the small finance tasks—and I expect that doing so will make me hun­dreds of pounds in inter­est and saved fees over the course of the year.
3. Don’t stop when you achieve your goals. Don’t stop when you fail. Per­se­vere.
   I’ve got a slew of projects—some of which have been rum­bling on for years, some of which are still cooking—and any num­ber of them could be mak­ing me money on the side. They’re not. Why? Either because I suc­ceed, stopped and let them dwin­dle, or because I never found a way to suc­ceed in mon­e­tiz­ing them and I gave up try­ing. Nei­ther is a good course of action. If I pick a project with poten­tial and work hard on it, I’ll reap the benefits.

I’m sure that these three mes­sages could ben­e­fit plenty of peo­ple beyond my desk. And though they’re sim­ple, they have the poten­tial to make a real dif­fer­ence. It all comes down to my sin­gle New Year’s Res­o­lu­tion for 2011, and one I intend to keep: work hard,  get rewarded.

What’s your plan for 2011? How would you work towards achiev­ing my res­o­lu­tion? 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…

Pic­ture this: you’re sat, note­book in hand, and you’ve begun to write, to draw, to cre­ate. You wisely decided to go ana­logue in order to get your cre­ative process started. Now you find your­self with the fuzzy out­line of an idea, some frac­tured con­tent, and a frame on which to hang a real and valu­able piece of work.

This hap­pens when brain­storm­ing for all man­ner of tasks, as var­ied as blog post­ing, writ­ing a Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion, plan­ning a pho­to­graph or writ­ing a quick Android app. The com­mon theme is that your work has some quan­tity, but no qual­ity. So what’s the next step?

The key to a good piece of work—be it aca­d­e­mic, pro­fes­sional, cre­ative or otherwise—is a cohe­sive, acces­si­ble, com­pre­hen­si­ble mes­sage. In a word, the key to a good piece of work is sim­plic­ity. Per­haps not in terms of sub­ject mat­ter, or in terms of style, but in terms of mes­sage. It is crit­i­cal that your audi­ence leaves with an under­stand­ing of the idea that you are try­ing to communicate.

How do we get from quan­tity to qual­ity; from com­plex­ity to simplicity?

Some mea­sure of sim­plic­ity can only be achieved through clear and con­cise lan­guage and a flair for design, but I believe that a great deal of com­plex­ity is caused by a sin­gle flaw: the cre­ator didn’t have a clear mes­sage in her own mind. Before you can com­mu­ni­cate effec­tively, you need to first get a firm grasp of the mes­sage on which you are focused.

How do you do that? Well, let’s say you’ve started with an ana­logue brain dump and you’re faced with a messy page to get you started. The first step is to look over the scrawl and see what con­nec­tions you can make. Look for pat­terns, com­mon themes, inter-related points. Start to join things up—numbering them, per­haps, or draw­ing con­nect­ing lines. Spot the patterns.

As you begin to find these links, this com­mon ground in your work, you will find your­self begin­ning to realise what the con­nec­tions really are. Focus on a par­tic­u­lar few points, and try to dis­cern how they gel together. The inter­est­ing thing is not the con­tent you already have on the page, but the com­mon theme run­ning through it. Once you fig­ure out the core mes­sage or idea beneath a group, then you can think about what addi­tional con­tent you might want to add to it. What else might be rel­e­vant or inter­est­ing? What might rein­force the theme or even explain it?

As you con­tinue down this path, you may find your­self able to link up not just con­tent, but also the var­i­ous emerg­ing themes that are form­ing on your page. With a lit­tle extra thought and a few extra scrib­blings, the themes will begin to come together to form a cohe­sive move­ment. Per­haps one fol­lows into another; or per­haps one core theme runs through the rest of them. Either out­come is good: you now have a cen­tral focus on which every aspect of your work can reflect.

As you begin to cre­ate your product—be it blog post, slides, or otherwise—keep refer­ring back to your core theme. Are you being true to the mes­sage? Are you being con­cise and clear? Are you going off on a tan­gent? If in doubt, split your work up into mul­ti­ple parts. If you have two con­flict­ing mes­sages, why try to com­mu­ni­cate them both in the same breath?

This tech­nique has worked par­tic­u­larly well for me on busi­ness presentations—even intim­i­dat­ing ones to senior man­age­ment teams. It really helps me find hard-hitting mes­sages with­out get­ting bogged down in content-heavy slides.

I hope you find suc­cess with this method. If in doubt, keep it simple!

Do you have your own strat­egy for stay­ing on topic, find­ing clear mes­sages and com­mu­ni­cat­ing clearly? Have you used sim­i­lar tech­niques? Do you have any feed­back or sug­ges­tions on my method? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Travel can be wasted time, but it can also be a fruit­ful ses­sion that is hid­den amidst an oth­er­wise dreary part of the day. Some use it for work, some use it to read or to lis­ten to music.  I like to use it to set aside the time to let my mind wan­der, pull out my trusty note­book, and dump my thoughts onto the page.

Let me tell you: noth­ing that you can use with a key­board, mouse, touch­screen or oth­er­wise will com­pare to the sheer cre­ative force of a pen and paper.

When­ever I’m feel­ing cre­ative, or when­ever I would like to be feel­ing cre­ative, noth­ing spurs me on like a crisp, blank page stretched out before me. Open a note­book, take a pen in your hand, and wait. When I see that yawn­ing expanse of empti­ness and know that I alone am expected to fill it, it flicks a switch in my mind. It some­how reaches inside me, draw­ing my cre­ative energy into my fin­gers, through my pen and out into the world.

If it all sounds too sim­ple, too easy—or even beau­ti­ful, somehow—then let me assure you that it is most cer­tainly not. When that inky wave of energy hits the page, hurl­ing itself against the white, narrow-ruled cliffs, it is noth­ing but flot­sam and jet­sam. All that lies before you is a tan­gle of half-formed ideas: themes that have yet to become a symphony.

But the themes are present.

Start with an idea, sketch it out, and begin to brain­storm. Don’t worry about struc­tures or links; get the frag­ments onto the page in whichever way you see fit. If you find your­self group­ing thoughts together, going back up the page to add new ideas, draw­ing lines or even scrib­bling things out, then go with it. Let your ideas flow, but don’t try to line them up too neatly. Elab­o­rate on the ini­tial thoughts when you can think of some­thing clever, but move on to new pas­tures if you can’t.

Before you know it, you’ll have a bur­geon­ing mess of ideas. Some will be good, some will not. Some will drive you from one page to the next. Some will prompt you to rush off on a tan­gent or push you in a direc­tion you hadn’t con­sid­ered. Oth­ers will stop dead and be left hang­ing in the air like an awk­ward silence. It doesn’t mat­ter: another thought will soon take their place and fill the page with easy­go­ing chatter.

Later on, the next time you sit down to work on some­thing seri­ously, you will find your­self fore­armed with a slew of thought-provoking prompts to help you out. You already have a way around the writ­ers’ block, a hint for when you run out of steam, or a gen­tle push towards your next great piece of work.

Pen and paper have helped me to achieve a great many things over the years. White­boards have done the same. With­out ink, I wouldn’t have thought up British­Bonus or Surely Not!, projects which ended up pay­ing for my degree. With­out a note­book, I wouldn’t have come up with the killer slo­gans and core mes­sages behind the War­wick Athe­ists soci­ety. With­out a white­board, I wouldn’t have passed any of my final year exams.

Get­ting offline and using our hands inspires some­thing pri­mal, some­thing cre­ative that has existed since we made our first tools and painted our first caves. Try it: you’ll be pleas­antly surprised.

I have to con­fess that I’ve tried my hand at blog­ging before.

First time, I jumped in head first with­out a plan nor a goal. I had been work­ing on my own web­site (a pre­cur­sor to this one) in order to improve my web–design skills. As part of the process I hand–coded a CMS in PHP. It began as noth­ing more than a learn­ing exer­cise, but before I knew it the code had some­how mor­phed into a fledg­ling blog.

So it began. I had a web­site, I had a blog. What else was I to do but start post­ing content?

With­out direc­tion I began to con­coct arti­cles regard­ing any and all top­ics on which I could throw together 500 words. I jumped from posts on web design, a topic about which I know very lit­tle, to ill–conceived attempts to pro­mul­gate my opin­ion on the supe­ri­or­ity of Linux over Windows.

In due course my enthu­si­asm for the blog failed and the site became stale. So ended by first attempt at blogging.

Sev­eral years later I found myself inspired by the work of a friend and decided that I should have another crack at blog­ging.  The same site was treated to a redesign, this time using Word­Press and a cus­tomised ver­sion of the won­der­ful Hem­ing­way theme as a basis for the style, and I put together a post­ing plan to keep my efforts on track.

This worked well for me and my posts con­tin­ued to arrive at a daily pace for a month or so. The fre­quency at which con­tent appeared slowed in month two, and again in month three. By the fourth month I found myself unin­spired and unin­ter­ested. Yet again the site grew stale and even­tu­ally died a quiet death. In the words of T. S. Eliot:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Behind me I have two failed attempts at blog­ging— one of which was entered into with my eyes open— so why then am I try­ing to write a blog for a third time? This is but one of the ques­tions that I intend to explore in the com­ing weeks.

For now, this post is my under­stated return to the blo­gos­phere. As much as I hate the word, I’m excited to be back. Again. (Again again.)

All feed­back and thoughts on any aspect of the site would be grate­fully received. In the mean­time, I’ll try and work on writ­ing some­thing that is worth talk­ing about.