You may have read about the Iceland experiment. From 2015 to 2019, around 2,500 Icelanders were involved in two experiments to see how a shorter working week would affect their productivity. The results are in and the experiments yielded pleasing results for all concerned.

Last year too, (2020), another Scandinavian country, Finland, was rumoured to have plans to formalize a reduced work-week.

From my perspective the results were unsurprising. People were able to be just as effective working fewer hours per day or fewer days per week as they were under a standard 5 day work week or 40 hour work week.

In 2000 France announcd the loi Aubry a revision to the work week. The law, which reduced the statutory working week in France from 39 hours to 35 hours for companies with more than 20 employees and, in 2002, for companies with 20 employees or fewer was met with raised eyebrows in other countries. Those that specifically had reservations were those that somehow see time and attendance as a gauge of productivity.

The 5-hour work-day in progressive companies in progressive countries, has been practiced as a working model for many years. The reason the results hold no surprise is that people have a habit of filling the space that they occupy with themselves their stuff or their work practice and craft.

By switching to shorter working hours with the same workload, people may not do exactly the same work, but the performance results are effectively the same. The ability to get more done in less time really raises question marks around work practice and how productivity is measured.  In a narrow window of opportunity, to be effective, the worker will be more efficient in differentiating between useful activity and less useful activity, the important and the unimportant. They’ll invest their time and energy in the things that really contribute to achieving their assigned goals.

Digitalization, automation and a trend toward service and knowledge based work means that we need to engage in fewer and fewer simple tasks.

Instead, we have to be creative and do more thinking. The question then, is can you realistically do that 8 hours a day – for five days? That takes an awful lot of focus and commitment. The reality is that you need down-time in the work week and work-day, time to “recharge your batteries” and regenerate your thought processes – that is best done, away from a place of work – really tough, if you are working from home!

Having to compress your work into fewer hours also means that you have to be a bit more strict with yourself. You have to be more organized and more disciplined.

Less working hours also means that you have to take fewer breaks or pauses. The need for a break after a sustained couple of hours of work is, however very individual in nature. We see authors, artists and artisans of various sorts, who seem to just power through their work or craft for extended hours to meet a particular objective by a deadline, but we also know that such commitment and high intensity of practice is unsustainable for the long-term. COVID-19 put paid to any kind of normalcy in any case.

To avoid burnout or aford employees the necessary opportunity for a break there has to be a change in the mentality of leadership and more trust in self-management. These aspects are central to a switch in any kind of work arrangement – working from home included.

Instead of sending employees into total self-organization and avoiding the provision of directed and thoughtful leadership, there needs to be a recognition of opportunities for autonomous work on the part of both employee and manager. 

A five-hour day really has many advantages. One of the most important ones is a question of equal opportunities. For single parents working full-time, they now have the potential opportunity to spend more dedicated time with their children when school gets out – this leads to a healthier parental relationship. With couples, there is improved opportunities for interaction with partner, family, children or colleagues. The observation is that more clearly articulated and expanded leisure time leads to increased “personal happiness”. This will likely lead to less staff attrition.

The notion that ideas and in particular, good ones, come from “down-time” is statistically unproven but it is is also not uncommon for people to believe that good ideas come about from casual conversation.

This leads to an argument against the shorter work week idea, in that the “watercooler talk” or “kitchen talk” that a less compressed workday offers, means that creativity and collaborative opportunities for casual inspiration will be reduced because there will be more frenetic effort to get the work that needs to be done, well… done.

This perspective, assumes that after-hours interaction won’t happen. Of course, it will for those that choose it. The difference now, is that it will be more formally provided.

As with all things, even with a with a 9 to 5 – five day a week schedule or a any other schedule for that matter. The importance of goals and priorities doesn’t go away. In fact “warm bums on seats” is all very well for 40 hours but if you don’t have a clue what these people are doing or supposed to be doing. If you don’t have any meaningful objectives, key results or ways of measuring their effectiveness or productivity, that’s all they are, people seeing others and being seen themselves.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has fueled an acceleration of the evaluation of cloud technology by a broad swathe of industries and government organizations. 

The business case is well understood and clear. Avoid expansion of private data center infrastructure and enlargement of It infrastructure personnel and instead shift to a shared-services model where you’re working with an operational budget and a relatively predictable billing model. 

Outsourcing your IT, which is effectively what the cloud facilitates, means that you get the benefits of scaling from your cloud vendor and reduced risk with respect to personnel management and appropriate infrastructure handling. 

On the flip side, you have to somewhat homogenize what you use and there is perhaps a little less flexibility in terms of “turn-on-a-dime” provisioning and accommodation of some of the more nuanced IT needs that your organization might have. 

For the most part, users don’t particularly care about whether the systems that they access and use, are in the cloud or in some data center or computer room on the premises of the business. As long as the system performs acceptably, as long as they have access when they need it, and as long as they can rely and depend on the contents of the system, it could pretty much be anywhere.

Many organizations have been progressively migrating data and operations to the cloud. During the height of the pandemic, many companies saw the weaknesses in their existing infrastructure and quickly realized that to support a lot of remote desk-bound personnel, they needed systems and data services that were distributed and flexible. They needed to consider cloud infrastructure.

Depending on the data that they planned to port to the cloud though, they had to ensure that the systems and applications that they used, would work adequately in this new context. Further, their local regulatory authorities needed to be satisfied that data that was subject to regulatory compliance like personally identifiable data (PII) which is bound by data residency regulations was not being ported to systems in foreign countries. 

Fortunately, most of the leading providers have a pretty clear set of offerings that accommodate these regulations. The greater challenge comes when the organization adopting the technology has an unclear understanding of its obligations. 

A second aspect is an adequacy of securing the data. Again, the cloud providers have taken steps to secure customer data in the cloud but with that security comes a great many assumptions about an organization’s own policies, procedures, and measures to ensure that the “doors” that secure the data structures are not left unlocked or “copies of the keys” inappropriately made.

If anything, adoption of the cloud for infrastructure exposed systemic issues in the way businesses uses (and abuse) their technology and at the same time laid bare the fragility of their understanding and experience of supporting and servicing global user communities in a potentially wild-west frontier environment.

In effect, the pandemic itself, triggered an escalation of cyber attacks, a lot of this tied to the desk workers working from home on unsecured home networks and open wifi networks and devices.

It should also come as no surprise then, that we also learned about the ransomware incidents that peppered news reports at the end of the Spring of 2021. The characteristics of these businesses were diverse; the nature of their systems, equally so. The level of impact of the ransomware, specifically unclear. Their dependence on on-premise vs cloud technology is equally unclear.

What must hold true in all of this, is that in some way, these systems had at least some sort of connectivity or lax data exchange controls, possibly through home-workers, that enabled them to be infected with malware or ransomware and probably communicate with malware and ransomware zombie or stealth hosts. 

The result then is that technology leaders have become potentially reticent about further accelerating their cloud adoption. They’re also now wondering about the distributed network infrastructure and moreover, in some cases resolved to undo their cloud deployments. This is especially likely if there is the slightest hint of data loss. A position of zero-trust is becoming more commonplace. 

The concern for leaders then has to be how easy it is to reverse the decisions that have already been taken. Cloud adoption is supposed to lower, not increase costs, applications should be able to be simply ported to cloud infrastructure from on-premise servers and data centers and It has been reassured that managing the infrastructure is as easy as managing on-prem if not easier, and finally, there should be no compromise on performance. 

When all of these promises fail to get met, the calculators come out and the contracts are reviewed. Arlington Research on the state of Hybrid Cloud technology for Virtana (Feb ’21) a systems workload quality infrastructure monitoring and analytics platform provider suggests that out of 350 surveyed IT leaders, over 70% backpedaled or had plans to repatriate workloads on their public cloud systems. IDC research from a few years back (2019) revealed a potentially even higher number of 85%.

If your organization has signed long-term infrastructure contracts with hosting services, this might result in some doubled costs as you continue to pay for your cloud infrastructure for the remainder of your agreement and spin up or renew your on-premise systems.

You’ll also need to be thinking about how you ensure that the sensitive and valuable data that landed in your cloud environments gets properly, appropriately, and verifiably purged.

For those who have chosen to adopt new platforms in the migration, that is exclusively cloud-based, the choices may also be a little more limited and there may have to be a concession to have some on-premise and some in the cloud i.e. hybrid. 

For these, there may be no going back to the systems the way that they were.  Either way, part of the risk mitigation plan for migration towards the cloud needs to factor in the possibility that some of the changes may need to be undone.

As a child, my parents forced me to attend piano lessons. Since it was hardly of much interest to me I did not pay much attention to the practising and was not a good student.

Over the years I went through about three or four piano teachers and must have ‘tried’ to learn piano for about four or five years.

I studied theory, did some examinations and in the end, my parents pretty much gave up. I have a good ear for music but I lack the discipline to learn the principles and then practice.

I do envy an accomplished musician though. My daughter was also sent to the recorder and piano lessons, she also learned and played brass but since her college days, she has not played a musical instrument. I am not sure how she feels about it. We don’t discuss musicology at all.

Pianoforall has been around for over 26 years, starting as a 2-man startup that has grown into a global company.

Since then, it has gained a tremendous amount of their fame from their YouTube videos, which is what they are most popular for.

The piano lessons help teach students of all levels how to learn and play the piano.

They specifically offer a “retail package” that ranges anywhere from $65-$100, and they offer a “Basic Package” that ranges anywhere from $49-$75.

They also offer a “Pro Package” for $99.

The Basic Package is perfect for those who are looking to teach themselves how to play the piano, while the Pro Package is for those that are looking for more

It may not seem like an awful lot of money these days, a million bucks, but as small as that may seem to some, it is an unattainable sum for many. Most people across the globe will never have this amount of money pass through their hands let alone sit in their hands. Others will see this in almost the blink of an eye.

More important than earning a million, might be, holding on to it! I am no financial adviser but there is plenty out there to suggest that the sooner you get started on these life hacks the more likely you are to get to your first accumulated million.

Lifestyle changes to lower your expenses

• Sleep hygiene – go to bed at a regular hour before midnight
• Ensure you don’t have a kitchen sink full of dirty dishes, cups and glasses – wash as you go!
• Make going to bed a bit of a ritual
• Brush your teeth twice a day, and do try to floss!
• Start your day promptly at sunrise or shortly after, earlier if you prefer
• Make your bed when you get up
• Does your bed pass the sniff test – launder your bedclothes at least once a week, every two weeks at the minimum
• Do your laundry regularly, at least once a week

Eating

• Don’t shop when hungry.
• Buy in bulk less frequently. Sam’s Club, Hypermarkets and bulk discount clubs like Costco are good for getting in bulk but often you can get good prices at your local supermarket too.
• Buy what you need based on a plan
• Eat at home
• Learn how to cook
• Avoid takeout
• Avoid sugary drinks
• Avoid booze
• Avoid barista hot beverages – make it at home
• Don’t buy bottled water
• Stay hydrated, drink water regularly
• Reduce your red meat intake
• Look to the better proteins and natural sugars in beans and vegetables

Out and about

• Use public transport
• Take a bike where you need to go
• Rent a car for long trips and avoid personal ownership

House in order

• Sell stuff you don’t use or need, especially the spendy items like a car, a motorbike, sports equipment, electronics
• Go for the virtue and avoid the vice – if you’re a smoker – quit, avoid taking drugs (prescription or otherwise)
• Do your own taxes. Getting someone else to do your taxes for you should be your last resort unless you have some weird companies in your name or exotic filings that you need to do.
• Reevaluate your friendships – unfriend the fakers and posers and welcome the positive, resilient & optimistic genuine connections.
• Pay credit cards in full every month.
• Avoid loans and credit
• Get a good health insurance with above-average coverage.
• Get regular Exercise at least twice a week.
• Be curious about the world out there. Try to read many books (mostly non-fiction), especially in sectors out of your normal studies. Innovation comes from the ability to correlate information between different realms of knowledge.
• Dont upgrade your smartphone every year.
• Cut out social apps. remove Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and the like from your phone and only access them via a desktop computer – you will be suprised how much longer your battery lasts and how much time you have
• Second guess those purchases – do you really need that new mobile phone?
• If you like gaming, restrict play-time
• If you like watching TV, restrict TV-time
• Quit the shopaholic tendency and impulse buys, don’t use shopping as entertainment. If you’re bored, go for a walk!

Being the best at your job

• Complete your education. If you only have a GED, consoider community college, if you have an associates, consider a bachelor’s – If studying is not for you, examine how you can acquire new, useful skills (you do not need further education for many highly important and well paid skills relevant in today’s job market).
• Maintain contact with your classmates and peers through business networks like LinkedIn, Glassdoor and Xing and alumnus.
• Learn about Game Theory – as a field of study it uses mathematical model to evaluate strategic interaction among rational decision-makers. There are many applications in the social sciences, as well as work bound up in logic and science. You may have heard of the concept of the zero-sum game, in which participants gain or lose in a balance with other participants. These days, game theory is an umbrella term for the science of logical decision making among people, animals, and technology.
• Learn about Industry models and specialisms within those industries especially the most sought after ones
• If you’re working then work out where your role fits into the goals and objectives of the business
• Establish what the greatest challenges are for your role and your business area and brainstorm ways that these might be addressed
• Become the subject matter expert in your area of the business and consequently become the “go to” person that people first think of when looking to find an answer or solve a problem related to your job
• Many will do barely “enough” to hold onto their job and then go further in limiting themselves by doing a lot of complaining. Avoid being one of those people.
• The attitudinally positive problem-solver is a rare breed in many organizations and get rewarded accordingly as a desireable type of employee.
• Once you’ve earned your place as a desireable type of employee, consider how Game Theory becomes a way to encourage your supervisor, manager and employer to give you a better deal.
• Remember a better deal is made up of more than just your paycheck – it can include bonus, vacation time, opportunities
• Employers are continuously thinking about risk, and in particular the risk of employees leaving and going elsewhere.
• With the upper hand of desireability you now engage with your employer in a “dominated game” where the only possible outcome is for you to get a better deal.
• If you are an effective problem solver and still do not climb the ladder, it means that the opportunities at your current workplace are limited – but dont take too long to arrive at this conclusion.
• Do not allow this to demotivate your or result in your reducing your efforts to be the desireable employee instead start to look across the business units or outside your organization.
• With your job relatively secure, now is the time to start increasing your depth of knowledge on your employer’s dime.
• Refresh your LinkedIn or Xing profile, update your profile on Glassdoor.
• Start looking at positions and work out how well your skills align.
• Consider work abroad
• Overcome any fears you might regarding change, changing countries and changing jobs is not as risky as you might think.

Money Matters

• Reduce your number of credit cards, ideally down to one
• Use a debit card instead of a credit card
• Establish a savings plan and set aside a specific amount every paycheck for rainy days – aim to accumulate 6 months of post-tax salary (3-months if you are particularly good at avoiding emergencies).
• As cash it must be readily available for emergencies
• Consider a Stock day-trader Account with your bank and every month save 20%/30%/40%/50% of your after tax income – Invest in low commission S&P500 ETF by Vanguard (like “VOO” or “VIG”).
• Work on a ten year hold pattern
• Save aggressively, invest every month “no matter what“
• Consider the “dollar cost average” + “compound interest” to understand the benefits of saving and accummulating wealth
• Set up (both mentally and practically) a bare minimum that you must invest every month and deposit it into your stock account at the beginning of each month so you will not be able to spend it to buy useless stuff.
• As you progress in your career you will save more by earning more
• Aggressively saving avoids you spending what you earn or suffering the “increased lifestyle” trap.
• Consider that if you clear $3,000 a month before outgoings you should be saving at least $300 a month at the end of the year you will have $3,600 plus any accumulated growth
• After ten years your capital will be at least $36,000 with compound interest and dividends equivalent to your monthly contribution, and by then you should be clearingmore than $3,000 a month.
• Consider a side hussle by work at night, weekends and holidays but consider that if it all depends on the fruits of your labours then you cannot scale your service and support.
• Consider your economic viability target – If you are not making at least 1K per month, is this something you should really continue with?
• Look at “low hanging fruit” opportunities that others don’t see and become knowledgable about them
• Study quirky, even awkward and neglected market niches, that may be the proverbial goldmine for those able to satisfy them.
• Once your side business starts making 10k USD / month you can start evaluating if your current salaried job is worth the effort / time / hassle.

The first million is by far the hardest but you need to have a plan… This question with some answers originally appeared on Quora

I previously wrote about how you can consider a compass and its purpose and utility in the same way. Think of the it as an opportunity to pause for thought and engage in introspection. This process requires you to define way points and then embark on your journey. You then need to periodically reassess the situation to make sure that you are on track, and ensure that you are appropriately equipped to succeed.

I wanted to conclude my narrative on this topic with an elaboration on my thoughts as they relate to finding your North Star. Much has been written about this topic but there were a few nuggets that I thought were worth just restating. When I talk about your North Star, I’m referring to your self-defined life purpose. If you do have one, you potentially have it as a endpoint that keeps you firmly on a path of personal fulfilment and an understanding of your own success potential.

As other writers have stated, it is not about making your first million or the next 10. It is more about finding an authentic ambition. In this context of the compass it is your internal compass. It uniquely represents you, your values and who you are. As Lifehack Founder and CEO Leon Ho asks:

“Have you discovered your life purpose? Or are you simply drifting aimlessly on an ocean of wishful thinking?”

The challenge is to “Dare to dream” and because a North Star will provide you with incredible energy, drive and persistence and it become the distinction between having a fatalistic “come what may” disposition versus one where there are things you must do to be successful.

If you have a clear understanding of “why” then everything you undertake to do, will be more authentic and attract unknown possibilities. Consequently, ask yourself these fundamental questions:

• What is it that I love to do?
• What is it that you need?
• What do I want to be?
• How will I know that I have what I need,
• I will I know I have become what I want to be?
• How will I know that I love where I am?

Hopefully you have some clarity on all these questions, but if not, then now is as good a time as any, to start asking them. Most important, is to focus on the objective behind asking these questions. Just like setting goals and defining objectives, your personal objective is your North Star. That could be as something as simple as retiring by age 50 with no debt, good health and the satisfaction that you have led a moral and ethical life. The next question will be what do you need to achieve that? It could be that you need to have a good education, a good savings or retirement plan. The “to be” is to be not working in a regular 9 – 5 job perhaps? How you know you will have achieved all this, is measured by your waypoints, your projection of needs for your retirement and so on.

Now, let’s be clear, you don’t need to have all this worked out. Ultimately though, if having an end-game in mind, brings you more satisfaction, well-being and contentment, then that is all that ultimately matters. You don’t want to arrive at a juncture in your life when there is a mad scramble to get certain things done because otherwise you will feel that you have led a less than meaningful life or a less remarkable life.

Hopefully this post has inspired you to take pause and reflect on your current circumstances or your ambition. I would life to hear from you if it has. Please feel free to comment and let me know if there is anything of particular interest to you that you would like to hear my thoughts on. Also, if you have a topic you would like me to research or elaborate on for a fee paid engagement, please feel free to reach out to me.

How to Find Your North Star