Work Less and Do More

As you know if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, I own both a Mac and a PC. I’ve been a PC user since MS-DOS-only machines. Two years ago I switched to a Mac after having to do three complete disk wipes + reinstalls on my Windows machines (two desktops and a laptop) in the space of six months. I continue to own both systems, and am often astounded at the lack of business thinking people betray when they shrilly scream their throats raw about how much more expensive it is to own a Mac than a PC. Here’s my response. I’m approaching the question like a business person and will try to show why, for me, it’s not even a close comparison.

If you’re a pure home user, my points may not apply to you. If you run your own home business, however, read this carefully.

A friend (“Murgatroid”) just posted this to Facebook: My friend wrote: Linux is cheaper than Mac…I’m gradually migrating to Ubuntu for my everyday stuff.

I was horrified at this penny-wise, pound-foolish decision. Here’s my response:

Murgatroid, if you’re looking at cost, my guess is that you consider maintaining your system to be a fun leisure activity. If not–if you think maintenance is part of your business–you need to take a good, hard look at how you value your time. Your time is not free and in an economy like this, spending it networking, establishing a reputation, getting your name out there, and doing billable work is far, far more valuable than using your time to save a few hundred dollars on a computer.

I find “cost of computer” discussions to be void of business logic. You’ll use a computer for 3+ years (if not, you’re buying a toy, not a business device), and for many of us, it’s our #1 most important work tool (with our phone a close second). Over three years, you’re probably paying about 66% less per day for your computer than you pay for your cell phone or cable TV, even if you have a top-of-the-line computer.

“Ok,” you say, “but what about the price difference between PCs and Macs? PCs are still cheaper than Macs.” Although a case can be made that Macs and PCs are comparable when you factor in the configuration and performance details, let’s pretend a  Mac costs $500 more than an equivalent PC. Fine. Over 3 years, that’s 45 cents/day. If you save a single day of your time in increased productivity or decreased maintenance costs over that entire three years, you’ve more than made up the difference.

I’m sure Ubuntu is a great choice for you. Not being a techie, I have found most of the free software to be incomprehensible when it comes to installation. I never get to the point of being able to try it because the learning curve just to find and install it defeats me much of the time.

Download these 16 different subsystems from 9 different open source archives. Make sure to use “uhbykgu -gye” to install them and not “uhbykgu -gyf” as you normally would. If you’re using the Glorp CC#% compiler, try using “-ggg” to enable the advanced infrastructure option, but only if you have a ZZTOP 234/8 Motherboard.”

In short: if you factor in the cost of my time, the cost of ongoing maintenance, and the learning curve of open source, for me, it’s a no brainer that the Mac is the best business decision by a wide margin.

A random price breakdown of factors people rarely consider.

The software bundled with the Mac alone easily makes up for a big chunk of the price difference. iPhoto, iMovie, Mail, Address Book, and iCal all come bundled on the Mac. While Windoze has a few bundled pieces of software, I haven’t found them as functional or speedy as the Mac applications. For my main productivity apps, Mail, Address Book, and iCal, there’s simply no comparison. You’d need to buy Outlook or Office to get that functionality on Windows.

To get the full Office equivalent on the Mac does require a separate purchase. A five-seat license of iWork ‘09 (so you can run it on all your family Macs) is $99. One copy of MS Office for Windows is $379.95 for a one-seat license of the standard edition. I’ve used the iWork applications for two years now and once over the initial learning curve, I can produce everything I can with Office, only typically it’s faster and looks prettier.

Upgrades are cheaper. Apple users bitch about paying $100 for an upgrade to the Mac OS. A first-time purchase of an iWork family license is 25% cheaper than a single-user upgrade for Office. If you ever plan to upgrade, your Windoze is racking up $$ much faster than your Mac.

Software updates are smoother. If you’ve followed me on Twitter, you know I’ve twice had Microsoft Update apply some critical update and destroy chunks of my system. I’ve never had that happen with Apple. It doesn’t mean it won’t someday, but the Microsoft updates seem to do it once a year or so. Walking in to a busy workday to discover my computer needs 3 hours of maintenance to recover from a security update is not fun.

There’s far, far less maintenance. I once had brief responsibility for administering a network at my first job, and I got in the habit of keeping logs of all computer downtime, the reason, etc. Even my one remaining Windows machine–on which I install no new software, I spend more clock time each month doing maintenance activities of some sort than I’ve spent in two years on my two Macs. There’s simply no comparison. (“What do you mean disk space is low? I don’t use this machine and I cleaned up disk space a month ago? Oh. Poking around, I see the Windows Update patch installer has gradually accumulated 5Gb of installer files. Are these safe to delete? … research, research, experiment, experiment, pull hair out …”)

For enterprises, the math may be different. If you have to remotely administer a gazillion machines, maybe it really does make sense to use Microsoft enterprise-wide management tools. But that’s if you look at the cost of maintenance as hours-of-IT-staff-time only. If you factor in user downtime, user frustration, mysterious lost files, etc., your total enterprise-wide cost to own those Windoze machines still may be comparable.

Geeks are different.

Some people loudly cry, “But I just do the maintenance myself!!” Yeah, yeah, yeah. And your opinion is irrelevant to the other 99% of the population. If you happen to consider maintaining your Windoze or Ubuntu to be leisure activity, then that’s fine. But don’t pretend that your situation compares to those of us who want nothing more than to leave our computers on a desert island forever so we can get on with our lives.

People who have to pay for maintenance typically pay $80 for a program installation and rates that go up from there for anything serious. That doesn’t include the expense of shipping or driving their computer to the repair place and being without it for days while they diagnose and fix.

And that doesn’t even begin to account for their time. Because for most of us, fixing our computer does not bring time, money, or happiness to us. That means it’s an expense, pure and simple. Time I spend recovering from Windows Update is time I’m not doing work that would bring me income, or playing with things that would bring me happiness. If you’re self-employed, unless what you do is extremely low-wage, it’s almost never a good business decision to fix your own computer if it will take more than an hour or two to diagnose and fix, even if you’re capable of it. Over my 10+ years of Windows ownership, I gradually noticed that most of the time, any problem that took more than two hours to track down and fix would ultimately take days. I adopted a new policy: if I can’t find and fix it in two hours, I simply bite the bullet, wipe the hard drive, and spend the 12 hours it typically takes to reinstall, reactivate, and reconfigure my Windoze. Yes, it takes out a day (thus sucking up enough lost productivity to pay for multiple Macs), but at least it doesn’t take out a week, which is what it used to take with Windoze.

In short: for me as a business user, the Mac is cheaper. The software is much cheaper. The upgrades to the software are cheaper. Plus, the saved maintenance time is super-low.

I’m reading an article on how Henry Paulson had talks with Goldman Sachs when he was designing the financial bailout. Of course he claims there was no favoritism or influence. Politicians also claim they’re not too influenced by lobbyists. And a few years ago, Cokie Roberts generated some heat when it turns out she was being paid speaking fees by some companies she was ostensibly investigating. And let us remember fondly Vice President Cheney, whose ties to Halliburton surely had nothing to do with the tens of billions of dollars of no-bid contracts they received while he was in office.

What all these stories have in common is that from the outside, there appears to be a conflict of interest. Yet those on the inside insist there is none. Fortunately, this is a very, very easy situation to analyze.

There is conflict of interest. Period.

There is forty years of social psychology research that shows when you benefit from someone’s actions, you are much more likely to view them in a positive light. You are also much more likely to reciprocate. In fact, you will be willing to reciprocate far out of proportion to the favor the person did for you initially.

“But I know about these social psychology phenomena, so I don’t let them affect me.”

That sounds so nice and reasonable. And if everything worked according to logic, it would be. But even as the reciprocity principle happens at a deeper brain level than logic, so it turns out that you can’t correct for these biases by simply deciding to. What you’ll do is continue to be as biased as before, only you’ll come up with new rationalizations and justifications for it.

I’m not feeling ambitious enough to dig out specific citations for the science I’m referring to, but the book Influence by Robert Cialdini pretty much covers them all, appropriately analyzed and footnoted.

So I say this to elected officials who are bailing out the companies they have personal ties to, to journalists who claim impartiality while accepting large fees, to scientists whose research is funded by pharmaceutal companies: you are not impartial. You can not be impartial as long as you’re accepting money or favors. The only way to be impartial is to dissociate yourself completely from the influences in question. Otherwise any claim of impartiality will be at best self-deception, and at worst, knowing hypocrisy.

I wore jeans, fluorescent shoes (see my Facebook page http://bit.ly/gidg for a picture), and a T-shirt to the HBS Club of Boston presentation on “Emerging Billion-Dollar Trends.”

Nothing happened.

People I knew talked to me. The presenter hugged me. The guy sitting next to me chatted. A couple of venture capitalists entered the conversation I was part of and were as courteous as they ever are. I had a perfectly fine time.

No one seemed offended, taken aback, disrespected, or dismissive. My worst fears simply didn’t materialize along any dimension. (I suspected  they wouldn’t. When I noticed how much emotional energy I had invested in being afraid it would be problematic, that very investment was a clue that irrational emotional crap was almost certainly overreacting to a real world situation. The fact that many other people have the same fear does not in any way make the fear more real.)

I am going to a business presentation tonight and am coming straight from my writing haven to the event. I wear jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers in the Haven. I’ve noticed that the thought of going to the business presentation dressed like that is scary to me. Scary. What’s up with that? What am I actually scared of, just from wearing different clothes?

I try to be concrete with my answer. “It would be bad for my reputation” is the kind of thought I have. But what does that actually mean? Do I think I would lose business? Do I think people would say “That Stever, he wears jeans so he must not be any good at what he does.”? Getting concrete makes it clear to me that my fears are rather absurd in a lot of ways. I’ve decided to dress casually tonight just to see what happens–both with the other people, but more importantly, in my own head as I play mindgames with myself.

Would you wear jeans and a T-shirt to a business event? Why or why not? If you’d be scared to, what do you actually think would happen?

My agent just read my current book draft. She says I have way, way, way too much content. *Urp!* I need to trim down the quantity and make it flow much more smoothly.

Hey, I went to one of those schools that was like “taking a drink from a firehose.” If you don’t have water squirting out your nose, there wasn’t enough content, right?

I’m collecting beliefs about time management and making daily progress. Could you share your beliefs with me? These are simply the “conventional wisdom” that you now take for granted. These beliefs may or may not be true, the key element is that we no longer question them.

Here are some of mine:

• I haven’t enough time to get everything done.
• I need large blocks of uninterrupted time to work.
• It’s possible to have consistent, high levels of productivity day after day.
• If I’m not frantically doing stuff, I’m not working.
• I should do things my boss asks for first, even if it means slipping other schedules.

I follow lots of people on Twitter, many of whom I followed reflexively after they followed me, before it got infeasible to do that.

I’ve noticed there seem to be a few different kinds of twitterers:

• Redirectors. People whose tweets mainly serve to point me to other interesting articles, videos, and websites.
• Tipsters. People whose tweets actually contain tips or useful information.
• Personalities. People whose tweets reveal something interesting about them, so I get intrigued by them as a person, and possible also intrigued by their content.
• Marketers. Lots of self-promotion and/or product promotion. 
• Randoms. People who tweet random facts about their life that are not revealing or interesting. “Am walking down Street.” 
• … have I missed any Twitterer types? 

My podcast is where I share tips (let’s get real: the amount of content I have to generate to keep two newsletters, two blogs, a podcast and a book going is unreal. I can’t add Twitter to that load, too).

On Twitter, I’m trying to be a Personality, more than anything. I tweet about things that interest me, and also that affect me in emotional, personal ways. It’s been an interesting journey, since I started on Twitter purely as a way to stay social with my friends. Given the podcast and upcoming book, my presence has evolved into a complicated mix of trying to stay personal and yet build a community that can become the basis for some kind of career (workshops? media presence? information products?).

Since I have no grand plan, I’m just meandering on my own trying to connect in a personal, rather than informational, way.

Do you have any thoughts on my Twitter/Facebook presence? Is there anything you would like me to do differently that would make me more worth following, and/or build a stronger connection of whatever type between me and the Get-it-Done Guy/Stever Robbins community?

I’ve been reading a lot recently about the fundamental unknowability of the universe. I’d like to include a tip or two in my book on the topic, but truly, I’m at a loss. So I’m turning to you, in the hopes you can share some ideas.

When we’re doing something we’ve done before, or trying to do the same thing others have done before, we have many tools: we can set goals, we can break the goals down into subtasks, we can do research, look at statistics and trends, and try to predict the future. This is the thrust of our education (MBA education, at least), and is generally accepted wisdom.

Some things in the world are risky. They’re unknown. For example, should I accept the job offer from company X? With some careful framing of the question, a few phone calls, and some due diligence, I can at least get a good idea of what it might be like to work for company X. 

Other things in the world are uncertain. They are fundamentally unknowable. Either they’re completely new so the human race lacks the past experience to know them, or the outcomes are so dependent on so many different things that for all intents and purposes, they’re unknowable. Some unknowables: (in 2003) Will the iPod catch on in the marketplace? Will my current job lead me to the next career step I want? Will global warming cause serious problems for the human race? What will I be doing in my life five years from now?

We sometimes mistake the uncertain/unknowable for the risky/unknown. We believe that saving for retirement is a good thing and we invest using prudent risk models, which is essentially believing that economic future is risky and unknown, but we can control the risk (and thus, it’s knowable to some degree). Then the economy collapses the very year a person retires, and it turns out that while certain market aspects were unknown, the actual result of “saving for retirement” (which must include consideration of the market conditions at the time of retirement) turns out to be unknowable and uncertain.

How do you approach the unknowable in your life? Do you try to plan? Do you get scared and avoid it as best you can? Do you throw yourself into the future with wild abandon?

What are some of the things you believe about how predictable and controllable your life is, and how your approach to life differs (or doesn’t) for the known, the knowable, and the unknowable?

I’m working on a segment for the book about asking for help. I’ve noticed that I just don’t ask for help nearly enough.

Here are some of the reasons why:

• I don’t want to admit to myself that I don’t know the thing.
• I don’t realize that I need help, even though I’m not making any progress.
• I only have a certain number of “silver bullets” and don’t want to use them up.

What are some of the things you think that get you not to ask for help?

There are many places in my book where I change names to protect the innocent (or guilty), or where I am just telling a made-up story and need a character name.

I’ve been going through my list of gender-neutral names, in an attempt to let readers indulge their own stereotypes instead of my own, when I realized with a shock that all the names are American names, typically of the white, middle-class, variety. There wasn’t a Vinod or Hiroki or Sjooki among them. I’d like to fix that!

If you know any, could you share with me some names from different cultures, languages, and ethnicities? Please let me know the name and the ethnicity/language it comes from, plus what gender the name is. Gender-neutral names preferred but not necessary. Thank you!!