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Posts Tagged ‘Management’:


To-Do Lists – Helpful or Useless?

Published by in Business Advice, Management on January 25th, 2012

I like my whiteboard – when I have room to have one on my office wall. I usually dutifully list my tasks I need to do – and then promptly forget about it! It makes me feel good that I made my To-Do List, but it factors in only a portion of my organizational planning. Why? To-Do Lists Overwhelming? If I added all of my tasks on my To-Do List, I would simply get overwhelmed by all that needs to be done, and then I would get started on the easiest task first. I follow another method – its called

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First Day of the Week: Sunday or Monday?

Published by in Engineering, Human Factors, Usabiliity on January 24th, 2012

I am sure you have wondered about this. Is Sunday or Monday the first day of the week? If you haven’t, then you haven’t bought a calender in Canada and sent it as a gift to someone in Germany. Coming from Canada, the calendar week always started on Sunday. Now, living Germany, I have to get used to writing my calendar notes not on Tuesday when I meant to write it on Monday! Confusing? It is for me. Sometime back in 2001 when I first moved to Berlin, I walked into my doctor’s office expecting to see my doctor. The

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How to Work from Home

Published by in Business Advice on January 9th, 2012

I found a useful article on the FastCompany website that sums up the key problems of working from home. Kevin Purdy, the author, zeros in on making a home office work – MEAN IT! Work is work, whether in a company office or a home office. Behave in a home office as if it was a company office. He advises: Look the Part, Be the Part – Dress for Success is not a buzz word. It sets the mind. He says, if you aren’t dressed for the UPS guy, you aren’t in the right frame of mind for working. Schedule

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Getting Information from (Out of) Engineers

Published by in Management, Technical Writing on July 30th, 2011

After 17 or so years in the Tech Writing business, I have a bit to say about getting information from Engineers. It is a key part of a technical writer’s job. I consider this part of the job as part diplomat, part comedian, part manager, and part psychologist. 1. Engineers need to provide the information Obviously, getting the respect of the Engineer is important. But it isn’t always necessary. Getting the engineer to realize they need to provide information to the Tech Writer so they can do their job is absolutely necessary. This realization can take many forms, first and

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ISO 9000 and Technical Writers

Published by in Management, Technical Writing on June 21st, 2011

Germany is ranked 6th in terms of number of certificates issued to companies that conform to the ISO 9001 Quality Management System, according to Wikipedia. To be certified, a company must institute a quality policy that is actually implemented throughout the organization. The company is then audited to determine if it is conformance to this policy . Deviations from this policy are handled effectively and quickly. The policy is not an end in itself. The goal is to reduce bad products by controlling and documenting the development and production process from start to finish and to resolve problems that lead

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Finding Time to Write Blog Posts

Published by in Management on April 12th, 2011

I remember Tom Johnson of Idratherbewriting giving me a sense of how much work is required to maintain a blog. If you look at Tom’s blog, he posts about once a day, weekends excluded. Sometimes he posts once every day, other times he is posting every other day or sometimes three times per week. Now, consider it takes approximately a half hour to one hour to compose, proofread and publish a post. This amounts to 5 hours per week to write the posts to a blog. The maintenance of the site, that is the nuts and bolts of the thing

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