I’m the kind of person who likes to see some order in my life, at least on the most basic level. I can handle all kinds of change and variation, but I like to have at least some continuity that I can hold on to. For this reason, I have always been annoyed that the number of days in a month is constantly changing and that every 4 years an extra day is jammed in at the end of February which shifts all the subsequent days for the rest of the year. It all seems so arbitrary and random, like some group of intellectuals came together a long time ago and decided to just screw with us. I hear them laughing every time I have to detail out monthly budgets or project schedules.
If you dig into the evolution of our calendar you come away with an archaic concoction of sun cycles, lunar cycles, and religious decrees. Whatever the rationale, it is obsolete, annoying and wastes a lot of money on a global scale.
Consequently, I think it is high time we dumped our antiquated 12 month calendar and substitute one that fits our modern world much better. We should start a totally new era with a calendar of 13 equal months. That’s right, 13 months. This will not only simplify our lives at a time when we desperately need it, but will save an incalculable amount of money and time. Hear me out.
Every month would have exactly 4 weeks or 28 days except for December which would have 29 days. This would provide the opportunity to designate the last day of December as a global holiday that leads into New Years Day. It would provide a formal day to review our accomplishments and make wildly optimistic plans for the coming year.
Here are 10 compelling reasons to make the change. Maybe you can think of more.
1. The first of the month would always fall on the same day of the week, let’s pick Sunday. Of course this means that each day of the month would always fall on its same weekday month to month. After a while, you would intuitively know what the date is by what day of the week it was, and vice versa. This alone would prevent millions of missed appointments and mixups. No one would ever tell you to meet him on Thursday the 18th because they would know that Thursday always falls on the 19th.
2. One week would be exactly ¼ of a month, 2 weeks, ½ of a month, and so on. Forget about multiplying 4.33 times the weekly rate to get a monthly rate.
3. Monthly budgets would be greatly simplified since every month would be the same number of days. The same thing goes for payroll.
4. Billions would be saved just on the effort spent planning out recurring events each year, not to mention money wasted buying new calendars.
5. Monthly interest charges would be consistent and easier to calculate.
6. Millions of digital devices that work with dates and time spans would be easier to code.
7. Your birthday would always fall on the same day of the week, as would all holidays. New Years Day would always fall on a Sunday. Valentines Day would always fall on a Saturday (the best day of the week for this holiday). Gone would be the variability of holiday schedules from one year to the next.
8. Regular airline, bus, train and boat schedules would be simpler to publish since the day/date would remain consistent month after month.
9. Watches could be made without the date since any 5-year-old would know that if it’s Tuesday, then it is the 10th, not the 11th.
10. Currently, financial quarters are 90, 91 or 92 days long. With the new system, each financial quarter would be exactly 13 weeks. The 4th quarter would have one or two extra days; however on those days the markets would be closed along with most businesses.
Of course, you’ve probably already thought of the glaring problem here. In order to always have January first always fall on a Sunday, what do we do about the extra day at the end of the year?
Actually the solution is simple. You give that day a new name and insert it between Saturday December 28th and Sunday January 1st. We could call it Earthday, which would culminate with New Year’s Eve celebrations.
So, the last week of December would be one day longer, consisting of 8 days ending with Earthday. Of course, every 4 years the Earthday festival would stretch out to 2 days, followed by the New Years Eve celebrations. It would be a time for renewal and hope for the future. Maybe we call this extra leap year day Kickbackday.
Related to the small problem of getting consensus on what to name the extra days, what do you call the extra month and where do you insert it? I suggest a global internet-based contest to see who comes up with the coolest month name and a rationale for which two months to insert it between.
I propose Johnuary, inserted between July and August. It just sounds right to me.
Comments?
Monday, March 23
Saturday, February 28
Twitter vs The Dark Ages
I just learned that there are quite a few small business owners who have revenue in the 1 to 2 million range, maybe more, and they don’t even have email. This really shocks me. I guess it’s naive of me, but knowing how easy and cheap it is to set up a website and an email account, I am really surprised that there are still businesses that don’t avail themselves of this basic business tool.
For $5 per month and a few hours with the free software that many hosting services give you, you can create a simple brochure website about who you are, what your business is all about, and how people can contact you. Forget about getting on the first page of a google category search, someone should at least be able to type in your business name and find out some basic contact information.
This revelation came from a conversation I had today with a friend who is a business broker. He’s like a real estate broker but instead of homes, he helps people sell their business. He was telling me that quite a few of his clients don’t bother with setting up a website and a surprising number don’t even have email (or if they have email they rarely check it). These small business owners do virtually all their communicating face-to-face or with the postal service, faxes and telephone. That’s the way they have been doing it for 30 years and they see no reason to change.
Backing up a little bit, while driving to meet my friend for coffee this morning I caught a few minutes of a segment on NPR about technophobes. They were talking with Daniel Shore about Twitter and how people use it. I missed the first part of the show so I’m not sure how they define a technophobe, maybe anyone who isn’t into social networking. Now, I certainly don’t consider myself a technophobe, far from it. I love technology. My first computer was a 128k Mac that I bought in 1984. It wasn’t long thereafter that I signed up for a dialup AOL account and have been using email ever since.
However, I do not have a posse who anxiously await a tweet about what I’m wearing today, or which Starbucks I’m sitting at this very instant. I guess if you’re that much of an extrovert and can’t operate without constant reinforcement, well, to each his own. But what I find amazing is that the spectrum has broadened so much that there are young people now who are literally in constant electronic contact with their crew, and I mean constant, and at the other end of the spectrum there are people running multi-million dollar small businesses without even an email account much less a website. They probably just recently broke down and got cellphones.
Part of the reason I avoid things like Twitter is I can relate to this sense of being too “available” at times. When I have to travel to Asia for a project, the flight is about 12 hours and I’m usually flying alone. The week or two just prior to the trip is always hectic with prep work, meetings, emails and phone calls to China. When I finally get on to the plane and get in my seat, I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s a rare time when you have a 12 hour period all to yourself when no one can contact you, you can do whatever you want, sleep, read, write in your journal, whatever. You are not expected to call anyone and you don’t need to worry about someone calling you. Unless you foolishly left work to do on the plane, this is the ultimate free time.
Maybe we have already gone too far with the whole “being connected” thing. Maybe these last holdouts who eschew email and the internet are to be admired. I for one am not ready to be implanted with a communication chip that can interrupt whatever I’m doing 24/7 with a beep in my ear signaling to check my email.
For $5 per month and a few hours with the free software that many hosting services give you, you can create a simple brochure website about who you are, what your business is all about, and how people can contact you. Forget about getting on the first page of a google category search, someone should at least be able to type in your business name and find out some basic contact information.
This revelation came from a conversation I had today with a friend who is a business broker. He’s like a real estate broker but instead of homes, he helps people sell their business. He was telling me that quite a few of his clients don’t bother with setting up a website and a surprising number don’t even have email (or if they have email they rarely check it). These small business owners do virtually all their communicating face-to-face or with the postal service, faxes and telephone. That’s the way they have been doing it for 30 years and they see no reason to change.
Backing up a little bit, while driving to meet my friend for coffee this morning I caught a few minutes of a segment on NPR about technophobes. They were talking with Daniel Shore about Twitter and how people use it. I missed the first part of the show so I’m not sure how they define a technophobe, maybe anyone who isn’t into social networking. Now, I certainly don’t consider myself a technophobe, far from it. I love technology. My first computer was a 128k Mac that I bought in 1984. It wasn’t long thereafter that I signed up for a dialup AOL account and have been using email ever since.
However, I do not have a posse who anxiously await a tweet about what I’m wearing today, or which Starbucks I’m sitting at this very instant. I guess if you’re that much of an extrovert and can’t operate without constant reinforcement, well, to each his own. But what I find amazing is that the spectrum has broadened so much that there are young people now who are literally in constant electronic contact with their crew, and I mean constant, and at the other end of the spectrum there are people running multi-million dollar small businesses without even an email account much less a website. They probably just recently broke down and got cellphones.
Part of the reason I avoid things like Twitter is I can relate to this sense of being too “available” at times. When I have to travel to Asia for a project, the flight is about 12 hours and I’m usually flying alone. The week or two just prior to the trip is always hectic with prep work, meetings, emails and phone calls to China. When I finally get on to the plane and get in my seat, I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s a rare time when you have a 12 hour period all to yourself when no one can contact you, you can do whatever you want, sleep, read, write in your journal, whatever. You are not expected to call anyone and you don’t need to worry about someone calling you. Unless you foolishly left work to do on the plane, this is the ultimate free time.
Maybe we have already gone too far with the whole “being connected” thing. Maybe these last holdouts who eschew email and the internet are to be admired. I for one am not ready to be implanted with a communication chip that can interrupt whatever I’m doing 24/7 with a beep in my ear signaling to check my email.
Friday, February 20
How To Increase Perceived Value Without Redesigning Your Product
The market value of a product is all about customer perception. You can have the best product on the market but if people get it home and they only grasp half of what it can do, or they have trouble getting it set up, you’re sunk.
If you’re like me, before you make a big purchase you often go online to read the reviews. I tend to be suspicious of glowing reviews, wondering if the manufacturer hired people to write them. We all know that people are more motivated to complain than to praise but it seems like 90% of the reviews you see online are positive. It makes you wonder.
So I tend to pay more attention to the negative reviews. Some I discount if the person seems unreasonable, but I read them all. If enough red flags go up, I start checking out other brands, widening my search.
The point here is that a few negative reviews can really hurt your business. You need to pay attention to the whole experience of buying and using your product, not just how to get it into the shopping cart.
Let’s assume that you’ve put a lot of thought into the design of your product, it stacks up well against the competition and sales are good. Now your customer has it home but things are not going smoothly.
How many times have you yourself been frustrated while trying to assemble a product or trying to get it hooked up? You’re sitting there reading the manual and you get confused and annoyed.
One of two things has probably happened. The manual uses jargon or diagrams that are hard to understand making you feel stupid, or the manual is so poorly designed that you form a negative opinion about the product.
What happens next is 1) your customer takes the extra time to figure it out himself, 2) they spend an hour with the call center or 3) they return the product to the store.
In each case, you just lost someone who could have joined your virtual sales force. You transformed a happy customer into a dissatisfied customer, or worse, a guy who goes online and posts a bad review.
So, what are the attributes of effective product documentation?
- Clear language that explains the product without being condescending.
- Effective use of graphics. People comprehend and remember graphics quicker than words.
- Engaging page layout that doesn’t intimidate. A good layout makes it easy to read or scan the content and leads you through it in a logical sequence.
- Effective balance of content and white space. Huge blocks of text put people off.
- Links and navigation aids in electronic files.
- Advanced functions separated from the commonly used ones so people can learn the basics first.
- Separate sections for each language. If you mix languages in the same section, people will miss important facts.
- Safety issues highlighted and located where they make sense, not just listed in a big block at the beginning.
If your customer quickly learns all the features that they need and a few that they love but didn’t know they needed without getting frustrated, you’ve won.
Wednesday, November 26
IngenuiTEA
On this blog I often complain about products that don’t work, or about whole segements of consumer products that I think are technologically impaired. Today however, I will take the opposite approach and recommend a product that I have come across that I think is really well designed and explain why.
The item is a tea infuser. For those unfamiliar with the term, it allows you to make one or two cups of tea using loose leaf tea without resorting to making an entire pot. Infusers come in many forms, often just a small perforated metal capsule either on a chain or built into a sort of spoon contraption. These have limitations though in that they keep the tea contained in a small space, not unlike a tea bag. The better infusers allow the tea to expand or unfold and release all the flavor.
Speaking of tea bags, you should know that tea processors commonly sort out the best tea for loose leaf packaging leaving the poorer quality tea for use in tea bags. Tea bags have their place but loose leaf tea is generally better.
So if you appreciate good tea, you may be interested in this little tea infuser. It is simple to use but very ingenious. It’s called the IngenuiTea infuser sold by Adagio.com.
You simply put the loose leaf tea inside, pour in the water for one or two cups, and let it steep for a couple of minutes. I stir it once or twice to get the full flavor of the tea.
Then comes the cool part. You place the whole thing on top of your mug and it depresses a valve in the bottom of the infuser and releases the tea through a strainer into your cup. When you lift it up, the flow stops. In case you’re wondering, the bottom of the infuser is designed to keep the valve from opening when you set it on a flat counter.
Then you simply dump the tea leaves into a trash can and rinse it out. I suspect that a lot more people would use loose leaf tea if they knew about this simple little device. To me it represents a class of products that eliminate an inconvenience and thereby open up the market to people who wouldn’t normally get involved.
The IngenuiTea is made from polycarbonate, not cheap styrene so it is built to last. Plus it comes with a removable filter that you can clean or replace. This one goes on my short list of elegant designs.
The item is a tea infuser. For those unfamiliar with the term, it allows you to make one or two cups of tea using loose leaf tea without resorting to making an entire pot. Infusers come in many forms, often just a small perforated metal capsule either on a chain or built into a sort of spoon contraption. These have limitations though in that they keep the tea contained in a small space, not unlike a tea bag. The better infusers allow the tea to expand or unfold and release all the flavor.
Speaking of tea bags, you should know that tea processors commonly sort out the best tea for loose leaf packaging leaving the poorer quality tea for use in tea bags. Tea bags have their place but loose leaf tea is generally better.
So if you appreciate good tea, you may be interested in this little tea infuser. It is simple to use but very ingenious. It’s called the IngenuiTea infuser sold by Adagio.com.
You simply put the loose leaf tea inside, pour in the water for one or two cups, and let it steep for a couple of minutes. I stir it once or twice to get the full flavor of the tea.
Then comes the cool part. You place the whole thing on top of your mug and it depresses a valve in the bottom of the infuser and releases the tea through a strainer into your cup. When you lift it up, the flow stops. In case you’re wondering, the bottom of the infuser is designed to keep the valve from opening when you set it on a flat counter.
Then you simply dump the tea leaves into a trash can and rinse it out. I suspect that a lot more people would use loose leaf tea if they knew about this simple little device. To me it represents a class of products that eliminate an inconvenience and thereby open up the market to people who wouldn’t normally get involved.
The IngenuiTea is made from polycarbonate, not cheap styrene so it is built to last. Plus it comes with a removable filter that you can clean or replace. This one goes on my short list of elegant designs.
Thursday, October 23
California Budget Crisis Replaces Police With iRobots
iRobot, the company that makes the “Roomba” and a floor cleaning robot called “Scooba” (both built at the toy factory in Guanzhou that I visited last year) is also building military robots designed to carry weapons. Recently iRobot signed a contract to add tasers to their industrial/military robots. This is all happening in a climate of significant military interest in funding the development of tactical robots designed to “Hunt Down Uncooperative Humans.” These will be developed initially for military use. However, given the speed at which technology enters our culture, I expect to see robots replace expensive police very soon.
If shortly you see hundreds of bug-like creatures patrolling the streets of Santa Monica in the evening, I suggest you make every effort to suppress your girlfriend’s impulse to insult them. These creatures probably won’t be programmed with highly evolved ethics routines and you may find yourself either seriously incapacited or worse. Let’s hope they don’t also contract with Microsoft to write the software. Maybe by version 4.0 they will have gotten all the bugs out.
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