Tony K's Blog

One of my early blog postings was about my renewed attempt to lose some weight and get fit. That attempt went nowhere. I thought that making it public would give me some added incentive. Wrong. A better approach might be to use stickk.com which allows you to bring in supporters and people who you are accountable to. Well, that was February 2005. It's now three years later. It's funny, but my weight is almost exactly the same as it was then. I'm at 219 now, I was 221 then. In between though I ballooned to 235 lbs. I have lost those 16 lbs since April 2007. More importantly, my body fat is way down. In 2005, I reported 31% body fat. I think that was a high estimate, but now I am at around 20%. I can actually see and feel ab muscles now, where I could only pretend to feel them in 2005. My strength index at gymamerica.com has gone from 126 to 140. This partly reflects age as a correction factor, but it's not everything. I am stronger now than I was then. I have used kind...

This video is stunning. It simply makes my head spin. The changes coming in the next few years are unimaginable.

The expression crack the whip has two meanings. It can be in the sense of a boss (or parent), becoming more strict about work expectations, or it can be referring to the kids game, Crack The Whip. This post is about the latter, but as applied to work. I have been doing headquarters staff work for several years now. One of the issues with it is that you are collecting data and information from people who are not really interested in providing it. Then giving it to people who will not take no for an answer and have high expectations of the quality of the work as well as the data. The game crack the whip is described this way on wikipedia "One player, chosen as the "head" of the whip, runs (or skates) around in random directions, with subsequent players holding on to the hand of the previous player. The entire "tail" of the whip moves in those directions, but with much more force toward the end of the tail. The longer the tail, the more the forces act on the last ...

This one is aimed at Cooper and Will as they prepare to go out on their own, and also so that I have it archived. Being able to fold a t-shirt in 2 seconds is a good thing.

Merlin Mann of 43Folders fame has a philosophy called Inbox zero. He gave this talk at the Google campus in July 2007. It's worth a listen, but if you don't have time, his advice boils down to dealing with your inbox everyday. Every mail gets one of 5 things done to it: Delete (or Archive) - Don't spend a lot of time on building archive folders. Use built-in search capabilities to find things Delegate (Forward to someone else) Respond (keep it short) - Appropriate response length is good. My comment is to put important content into the subject. Defer (Put into a pending folder) - something that you check periodically to see if it has resolved. I use flags in Outlook to keep track of my deferred actions Do or capture a placeholder for it (such as a calendar or a task) General principles: Do email less (unless of course your job is real-time) Do email on a schedule. Turn off mail arrival signals, then once per hour process it using the above five actions. Go back to work. Fi...

This entry on the Overcoming Bias blog got me thinking. Bosses just want the number . I see a lot of confusion between planning, estimating, goal-setting, and forecasting. Forecasting Forecasting as often used in business is simply giving someone the number that represents business performance. Forecasting accurately is impossible , except maybe in the very short or very long term. Nonetheless, you still at some point need to come up with a number. Forecasting is best done using probabilistic techniques and reporting events as probabilities. Simply predicting a number, even if you are right is of little value in most circumstances. Can you imagine a weather forecaster simply saying, "Rain"? Without a percentage and a timing, it's simply not a real forecast. Estimates Likewise when you estimate business performance, wouldn't it be better to say, given the manpower and marketing budget, there is a 10% chance that we can sell 10,000 units, and a 90% chance that we can se...

I work with portfolios of real assets. One of the basic concepts of portfolio analysis and management is that you must know what you value. Very seldom does an organization have one single goal that it pursues to the exclusion of all others. It is a useful framework for looking at the mortgage problem that I wrote about earlier. If your single goal in life is to minimize the amount of interest you pay in your life, paying off your mortgage early may be a good strategy. For most people their house loan is the biggest loan they will ever get, typically paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest over the life of the loan. These are big numbers, exagerrated by the size of the loan and the time period. However, most people have goals besides minimizing the interest paid. If you take it up to a higher level, most people want to maximize their wealth, which in simple terms is simply money in minus money out. Money in that equation can represent any form of value including house appr...