XPLANE founder and CEO Dave Gray will be giving a visual thinking workshop in Toronto on September 8: “The title of the workshop will be ‘The Power of Pictonics: Using Visualizations to Tell Your Technology Story.’ I am really looking forward to this. There will be plenty of hands-on exercises to help you hone your visual thinking and storytelling skills. You’ll also learn some of the ’secret sauce’ that goes into making visual explanations. This will be a pretty special event, to be held in the beautiful and hi-tech MaRS convergence and innovation center in the downtown Discovery District. It also happens to coincide with the Toronto film festival, one of the best film festivals in North America in my opinion. So if you’ve been meaning to visit Toronto you couldn’t pick a better time.”

“#10: Let vendor upgrade timetables define your path of least resistance. Waiting for Vista? Need we say more?”

“Hello. We’re a new company. We started a business and quickly realized that we have a lot to learn. This is our link blog.”

From the SLIMTIMER [timesheet software] you can create tasks and even share them with your coworkers and those you report to. Open the SLIMTIMER and click on a task to start the clock and click again when you’re finished. If you’ve completed the task click the checkbox to mark it off. Close the browser when you’re done. Run reports of not only your time but also that of your coworkers and reportees. You can export any report to CSV(Excel), subscribe to its RSS feed, or email it to a colleague.

“Innovation is disruption; constant innovation is perpetual disruption. This seems to be the goal of a well-made network: to sustain a perpetual disequilibrium. A few economists studying the new economy (among them Paul Romer and Brian Arthur) have come to similar conclusions. Their work suggests that robust growth sustains itself by poising on the edge of constant chaos. ‘If I have had a constant purpose it is to show that transformation, change, and messiness are natural in the economy,’ writes Arthur.” (Thanks Noise Between Stations!)

“In today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, Jane Von Bergen has one of those tight, revealing stories about the world of work that will make you smile and you sad. Probably, it will come as no surprise. It’s about the prevalence of cliches in U.S. business writing, and in how business people talk about their work, their companies and their performance.”

“Over the years I have worked at many client sites and a variety of office layouts. On one project in particular, we had as many as 80 people in a project team, seated via an open plan arrangement. It was pretty difficult trying to stay focused in an environment like this. These days, the projects I’m on are typically smaller, but there are still a number of distractions which frequently interrupt my working groove. So what are some of the things we can do to minimise such interruptions and distractions? Here’s my list of 18 ways to stay focused at work…”

I am on the planes a decent amount of the time (100,000 miles by late May) and tend to spend a chunk of my flights using my laptop. Most of the time it’s productive, but it can also include a DVD or the occasional game… So I did a lil’ Googlin’ for tips on extending battery life, and I found them all pretty, well, lacking… Alas, I’ve gone and done a lot of experimenting and have a list of my tips to really maximize battery life for my laptop. Key to this process is having some good methodology.”

“Seth Godin is author of six books that have been bestsellers around the world and changed the way people think about marketing, entrepreneurship, and work. He is also a renowned speaker and a helluva nice guy. I cornered him and got him to answer ten (really eleven) questions about his latest book, Small is the New Big, and ‘life.’”

“Amazon used to be a large river in South America — but that was before the world wide web. This month the web is 15 years old and in that short time it has revolutionised the way we live, from shopping to booking flights, writing blogs to listening to music. Here, the Observer’s Net specialist charts the web’s remarkable early life and we tell the story of the 15 most influential websites to date.”

“My article 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job has quickly become very popular, so I figured it would be nice to write something about the realities of self-employment as well. Since there are so many myths about self-employment (especially among lifelong employees), a good place to start would be to dispel some of those myths. I started my first business right after graduating college (I graduated in Dec 1993) and have been continuously self-employed since then. The only time I was ever an employee was during college, when I worked six months as a part-time retail sales associate.”

“On Angel Day each startup will only get ten minutes, so we encourage them to focus on just two goals: (a) explain what you’re doing, and (b) explain why users will want it. That might sound easy, but it’s not when the speakers have no experience presenting, and they’re explaining technical matters to an audience that’s mostly non-technical.”

“I’m a law student and am working in a litigation firm this summer. I have been quite disappointed how little energy I have for ‘high’ culture when I get home from work. It’s just so easy to watch Friends! … How can I work, write fiction and consume culture in a workable way? Is the problem the ten hour work day? I’m interested to hear about your schedule and your thoughts on overcoming a (hated) tendency towards passivity.”

“Some colleagues at Adaptive Path have launched a survey on the business value of user experience, and how organizations treat user experience. It’s brief (about 5 minutes), and if you fill it out, you can get a free copy of our report ‘Leveraging Business Value.’”

“Make a site look like MS Word so you can read it at work…”