And I thought day dreaming at work was a bad thing?

It's funny being a bit of a day dreamer myself I always thought that doing it during work hours meant that I wasn't effectively making best use of my time, and always found myself feeling somewhat guilty if I felt that I'd been away with the fairies for too long - despite most of the time I'd been thinking about work, how to close deals, how I could have done something differentlly, better and/or easier.

I was listening to a talk back radio station today as I was driving back from lunch and I didn't really get to hear much of the interview itself, but from what I got it was abhout thinking differently and allowing yourself time during the day or week to do nothing but play with new things, new ideas and so on. One of the examples he gave immediately was as part of Google's work policy they allow one full day per week for staff to do nothing but play with things, and use their resources with the hope of coming up with a good idea - Google Earth for instance!
They quickly followed up by then saying that companies like 3M have actually been doing this for years, and allow 15% of a staff memebers time for the same thing - and neither company attaches a KPI to this either, so there's no pressure to come up with something better than the last.

The philosopy behind this idea is that we as a business hire you as a staff member and we think you're smart, so we're going to allow you time to play be creative and hopefully we may get one solid idea out of you that can change the way we do things around here for the better.

The question that was mentioned that I thought was a great question was this - if our industry was recreated tomorrow what would we do differently, what would we do to improve the system and service?

So if I had the chance to recreate the mobile services industry or Esendex for that matter? I'm not sure, and that's probably something for another blog.

What I will be doing is looking at the way I organise myself so that I can make the time in the week that allows me to think about it!

Cheers,
C