Companies are something set up by an entrepreneur with passion and most of the time run with a strict hierarchy in mind. There is one boss and several sub managers that each have their own responsibilities. As workdrone you have your own subset of tasks to work in an ‘oiled’ machine.

Top management decides which direction the company will go and what you have to do. They choose the direction that is most profitable for them and you as workdrone has to do the tasks or you can’t make a living. The whole society is run by these kind of systems of bosses and managers.

This has the side effect that work is a necessary evil. You have to spend certain hours on a task and it is governed by many strict rules. The work drone has to be controlled. Many people work towards their free hours where they can spend their well earned money and have some fun. The opposite of work is leisure.

Work 2.0 – The cages disappear

But what if work depended on passion? What if you could decide what to do and follow what you were attracted for when you first decided to do your job. Why not give the workdrone complete freedom to pursue their ambitions?

By setting up what the worker wants to work on you create a workforce that gets to work with more passion. But why let the worker work in an office on standard hours? Why couldn’t (s)he choose his/her own hours? Why don’t people trust their workforce? We want passionate thinkers, not drones….

The opposite of work should be idleness… Working should be something fun which you could combine with your personal life. What if it was fun? What would happen to our productivity? What would happen to our society

Want to know what could happen when we set loose those boundries on work? A Brazilian company Semco has done it and makes a revenue of 160 million a year.

Read more about how this company has done it in the Seven-day Weekend by Ricardo Semler.

Related:

• Leadership 2.0
• Big changes ahead for us
• Media 2.0 -The fall of Britney
• Politics 2.0
• Enemy 2.0

I really like to have new gadgets. I don’t buy gadgets suddenly but search for them till the right one comes by. For almost 4 years I had a nokia 3510, I got it cheap, it was reliable with long battery power and was very easy in calling and sending SMS functions. The calender grew on me to warn me on appointments I would otherwise forget in my sometimes chaotic states of mind. The alarmclock was used almost every day as my wakening call.

Regularly I looked around for what was on the market. Phones that could take pictures, nice iPods with lots of space, colorscreens, portable gaming units, small better portable camera’s etc. But everytime they were not right for me, it would ment I would have to carry another gadget with me all the time or to swap my phone with a less reliable phone that had all these first generation version features.

When I saw those new walkman phones at first I was very skeptical, camera’s were not for me and is such a music player good enough etc. But after a while I saw this was the solution I seeked. A gadget that combined many features good and was easy to use. I waited for the next generation and it became the Sony Ericsson w810i.

Some life enhancements with the new phone:

• This phone had a much better calender. It can sync seamlessly and wirelessly with my mac for easy management. Paper agendas don’t work with me but such an ‘always with me’ phone calender does.
• I can take pictures anywhere at a good resolution. I always missed a way to save those moments worth remembering. Also possible to capture videos (capture the mood) and sound.
• I always have a mp3 player with me for entertainment.
• I have a way to move files that I always can carry with me. Handy for those unexpected moments.
• I can access the internet anywhere. (opera mini 2.0 is cool) It works with gmail, most sites I visit, this weblog, public transport planners etc.
• My contacts are now also safe and easy manageble on my mac.
• All this in a total package less and lighter than my old phone.

I am excited about this phone. Not because it is a new ‘cool’ gadget but it enhances my life significantly. This has always been my main method of selecting new gadgets and many cool ones did not survive this to be mine.

She did some research for some big US tech companies and concluded that people only focus on tasks for 11 minutes before they begin a new task. According to her this is because of alle the new communication methods we have now. In earlier days you could use the phone if it was urgent and send something by regular mail to get a message accross, now you can get SMS, e-mail, chat message any moment in the day. And because you can get e-mail any second people check it about every few minutes. We are getting addicted to new information and are more focussing on keeping up to date than on getting the real jobs done. A small example of how people are keeping there todos in order are those stickeys on the monitor.

I myself am also guilthy of this kind of distractions. Sometimes I am addicted to get new updates every few minutes on my RSS feeds and begin rereading new updates and surfing on their links instead of getting really usefull things done. If I do something usefull behind the computer my mind is easily distracted by something online. I also need to learn to keep focussed in these distracting times.

Luckily she provided some tips to hack your life:

• Use bigger screens so you can get a more organized view. A single bigger monitor keeps users more focused on a task than multiple separated screens with each its own task.
• Use simple todo tasks. As lowtech as possible to keep it simple and reachable.
• If you are distraced by someone, deal with it directly and try to fix it in two minutes and add it to your todo list. After 2 minutes you are out of the flow and you have half forgotten where you where.
• Try to minimize your distractions, empty your chat program so it only contains your friends. Check only the most relevant RSS feeds. Use low tech solutions that not have distracting features. Only check your email/sites once per hour.

Well I will try to life by these rules and get more done. It is frustrating to see how you loose so much time with nothing. Its like you want to keep busy with the easiest and fun tasks.

Please leave a comment if you have more tips.

Update: A nice site with more tips: http://www.lifehack.org/