Are you in a "Product" or a "Process" job?

If you are in a Product-centric job, you spend most of your day with stuff: creating, updating, innovating, maintaining, fixing, changing, moving, archiving, restoring, refactoring, etc. Typical product-centric jobs include software developers, artists, designers, engineers, factory workers, accountants, loan underwriters, and tax attorneys.

If you are in a Process-centric job, you spend most of your day interacting with others: talking, emailing, selling, negotiating, motivating, intimidating, inspiring, communicating, etc. Typical process-centric jobs include sales, project managers teachers, trial lawyers, CEO's, loan officers, and managers.

Most people tend to prefer one or the other, and often find themselves in a job that is not in their preferred category. The result is often fatigue and general job dissatisfaction. If you stick process-centric people in an office all day with a stack of work to do, they'll be bored out of their mind and find as many chances as possible to wander to the water cooler to find out what's going on in the world. Likewise, if you send product-centric people out in the world to attend meetings, engage in lively conversations, and talk all day, they will get exhausted and feel like the day was a total waste of time because they didn't get anything done.

If the world had only process-centric people, there would be a constant buzz of activity, but little would ever get accomplished. If the world had only product-centric people, a lot of quality work may get done, but there's great risk that its value and usefulness may be questionable.

It's healthy to understand that it's normal for there to be misunderstanding and conflict between process and product people. Accept the need for both types and move on. Also, if you are a product person in a process job (or vice versa,) a job change could reduce your stress.

Download the Internet Here

I am a recovering pack rat. I've been accumulating 'stuff' for years, which totally contradicts my no-nonsense, practical, straightforward approach to most other things in life. Fortunately I am truly in recovery. I have started purging 'stuff' and was surprised to discover that it feels good.

So now that my closet and attic have lightened, I need to work on my next issue - being a media pack rat. All sorts of media: Music, videos, digital photos, electronic documents, etc. Many of these things are very personal and I will never purge them. Storage is cheap, so why not.

The media that I could probably let go of is the reference material that is readily available on the Internet: articles, white papers, web page content, etc. I have a tendency to take a snapshot of this information and store it on my computer for later use. That demonstrates a lack of confidence in our distributed information society - I don't have full confidence that I'll be able to find it again when I need it. As a matter of fact, maybe I better just buy a bigger hard disk and download the whole Internet to my computer so I'll always have my own copy.

Here's the link, in case you want a dowload a copy of the Internet for yourself: http://www.w3schools.com/downloadwww.htm

Cool!

A diversion from my ramblings, check out one of the coolest projects which combines great computer graphics with an upbeat new age composition. I first saw it on a PBS special, and there are clips on this website: http://www.animusic.com/clips/pipe-dream2.html

I had absolutely nothing to do with this, but I saw the videos on PBS and thought I should post so others who may be interested will know about it.