Varna’s Mind

From the earliest history of the LEGO company to the opening of the first LEGO Land, see the struggles of the fledgling company on its way to international fame in this animated short film.

[via Geek Dad]

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Let’s start with email. In theory, an email is something you don’t need to respond to right away. Otherwise, it would be an instant message, right? In practice, of course, letting an email from your boss go unanswered overnight is as good as writing back “i dont care, dont bother me, ur stupid.”

Kashmir Hill is our in-house privacy expert, so it figures she’d have the best ideas for cultivating a little mystery around what goes on in your personal time. She suggests a less-is-more approach: “Choose at least one widely distributed email to respond to at 10 p.m./11 p.m. to appear as if your hours go late into the night. Don’t get sucked into reading all your email. Just weigh in on the one that everyone else is responding to. Repeat as soon as you wake up, ideally before 7 a.m.”

Matthew Herper, our science and medicine writer, thinks the trick is to put other people on the defensive: “Send lots of short emails. Send some of them using an automailer when you’re on vacation. Leave your autoreply on so people think you’re super-engaged.”

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Susan Adams Forbes Staff

Vacations Are Good For Business!

Elena Bajic Contributor

I particularly like the approach espoused by Claire Robinson, our editorial operations manager. If someone tries to engage her by email after hours, she ups the ante and puts the onus on the other party. “I put my mobile number in my e-mail signature and emphasize it in my away message,” she says. “If it’s that important, call me. Most of the time, people will not abuse this. I of course check mail periodically during off-hours, but your brain needs a break. I’d rather be interrupted by a call alerting me to something truly important than checking mail constantly just in case.”

A FORBES Twitter follower, Hubert Clovenhoof, also has a suggestion for making sure only urgent matters disrupt your “me” time.

A colleague who prefers to remain anonymous admits to using email to create a little strategic ambiguity as to her whereabouts. “I like to be a little selective (shady?) with the ‘sent from my iPhone’ message. I keep it when replying to contributors in off hours so they know they’re bothering me, but sometimes delete it when writing to anyone more senior so they don’t know I’m out and about.”

Social media adds a whole extra layer to the challenge of keeping up your passive face time. If yours is one of the growing number of jobs that require you to maintain a social media presence, extended silence on Twitter/Facebook/Google can look too much like slacking.

Bruce Upbin, our managing editor and tech channel honcho, suggests a technological solution: “Tweetdeck has a scheduling function that allows you to stage dozens of tweets in advance so you can maintain your social presence EVEN WHEN YOU’RE NOT THERE.” Amazing.

Why stop there? As long as you don’t mind fiddling with a phone now and then in your leisure time, you can use those social ties to generate undeserved sympathy, says Kashmir:

If you’re Facebook friends or Twitter mutual followers with colleagues, you can imply you’re getting work done while on weekends/vacations with status updates/tweets. I.E. “It’s more fun doing document review poolside with a pina colada.” (Notice that statement does not actually state that you are doing document review, just that your current surroundings would make it more fun.)

Sneaky! But no so sneaky that FORBES reader Nicole Stockdale didn’t suggest a similar ruse.

Perception management doesn’t have to be so high-tech, or high-concept. Says Lewis DVorkin, our chief product officer, “I know some people who never turn off office lights, leaving the impression they are around late at night.”

My own tip is also an analog one: If you know you’ll be arriving late to the office, or leaving early, dress up a little. If you’re someone who regularly has working breakfasts or job-related functions to attend after work, anyone who notices your absence will just assume you’re putting in extra hours elsewhere.

At least that’s what I’m told. I’d never pull something like that myself.

***

 Read more:

Eight Ways Goofing Off Can Make You More Productive

Wasting Time Can Make You A Star At Work

11 Tips For Dealing With A Lazy Co-Worker

Growing up in a Maharashtrian family in Mumbai in the 1980s, I loved watching my mother dance. I wanted to be just like her, but she told me firmly that dancing wasn't for men. I persisted. When she wasn't at home, I would slip on a pair of ghungroos, dress in her sari and dance the way she did. One day, she came home early, caught me in the act and fired the domestic help for allowing me to dance. I was made to recite a thousand times that I would never do it again.

Well into my teens, I knew there was something wrong with me. I just didn't feel like a boy. I was awkward wearing male clothes at the popular Marathi school I attended. I much preferred the white-andblue skirts that girls wore. All my friends were girls. I was a tad offended when a boy in class confided his love for a girl to me. I wanted to know why he didn't feel that way about me.

As a child I loved dressing as a girl and playing with dolls. My mannerisms were effeminate. But like all families, mine, too, thought it was something I would grow out of.

I am now a proud member of the transgender hijra community and have come a long way from the confused boy I once was. I now work for India HIV/AIDS Alliance in Delhi as programme manager for Pehchan, a project in 17 states working with men who have sex with men (MSM), transgender and hijras, with a focus on HIV/AIDS awareness.

I am amused at the reaction I elicit from people. People are taken aback to meet an intellectual hijra. I recall how frightened I was the first time I saw a hijra as a child. My parents would tell me never to talk to hijras. I felt that if I became a hijra I would lose all dignity and put my parents to shame.

My journey from Abhijit Aher to Abhina Aher was far from easy. With no sex education in school, I had very little knowledge of gender issues while growing up. Whenever I told boys that I liked them, they would insult me and call me a faggot. But I never thought I was gay. I always felt like a woman. Once a bunch of boys got together and tried to rape me in school. I wasn't able to explain the situation to the principal. I have struggled for love, as the men I came in contact with often wanted nothing more than a physical relationship or money.

While working as a software engineer, I came across Bombay Dost, India's first LGBT magazine, through which I got in touch with Humsafar Trust started by gay rights activist Ashok Row Kavi. When I met Kavi, I realised for the first time that I wasn't the only one to feel the way I did. He said to me, "Abhi, Vikruti Evam Prakriti - whatever nature gives us is natural. So why do we insult Mother Nature and say that what she has bestowed on us is unnatural?"

I worked for Humsafar Trust for eight years. I began cross-dressing at the time. When people asked me why I did so, I told them that I felt I was in my own skin. Through the articles I read and people I interacted with, I found out about the process of changing one's gender from male to female. I learnt of the surgeries one has to undergo in the process. That's how I became transgender.

I came out to my mother, first that I was homosexual and then that I was transgender. It took my mother 10 years to accept me the way I am, because like me, she too lacked a thorough understanding of gender and sexuality. But now, she calls me her daughter. She is both supportive and protective of me and even attends queer cinema screenings, panel discussions and rallies.

My relatives took a while longer to accept me. For 17 years I never attended a single wedding or ceremony in the family. But now my relatives google my name and read of my achievements online.
While I have had my share of success, I must admit it's not easy being transgender in a transphobic world. I have been rejected by 17 hotels on a trip to Kerala and humiliated by the ground staff at several airports. While commuting on a daily basis, I am used to women giving me the once-over in a bid to figure out which gender I belong to, and men trying to take advantage of me.

But I have had the odd, poignant moment where my identity earns me some respect. Like the time I was walking down the road and a father and mother asked me to bless their son, who was appearing for the class X examination. They gave me a ten-rupee note. I was earning Rs 50, 000 a month at the time, working with John Hopkins University Centre for community programmes as technical specialist on marginalised groups. But I accepted the ten-rupee note as payment for my blessings.

As told to Anahita Mukherji

If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. If you scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it to the foyer before we politely escort you from the building.

Some might call my approach to grammar extreme, but I prefer Lynne Truss's more cuddly phraseology: I am a grammar "stickler." And, like Truss — author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves — I have a "zero tolerance approach" to grammar mistakes that make people look stupid.

Now, Truss and I disagree on what it means to have "zero tolerance." She thinks that people who mix up their itses "deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave," while I just think they deserve to be passed over for a job — even if they are otherwise qualified for the position.

Everyone who applies for a position at either of my companies, iFixit or Dozuki, takes a mandatory grammar test. Extenuating circumstances aside (dyslexia, English language learners, etc.), if job hopefuls can't distinguish between "to" and "too," their applications go into the bin.

Of course, we write for a living. iFixit.com is the world's largest online repair manual, and Dozuki helps companies write their own technical documentation, like paperless work instructions and step-by-step user manuals. So, it makes sense that we've made a preemptive strike against groan-worthy grammar errors.

But grammar is relevant for all companies. Yes, language is constantly changing, but that doesn't make grammar unimportant. Good grammar is credibility, especially on the internet. In blog posts, on Facebook statuses, in e-mails, and on company websites, your words are all you have. They are a projection of you in your physical absence. And, for better or worse, people judge you if you can't tell the difference between their, there, and they're.

Good grammar makes good business sense — and not just when it comes to hiring writers. Writing isn't in the official job description of most people in our office. Still, we give our grammar test to everybody, including our salespeople, our operations staff, and our programmers.

On the face of it, my zero tolerance approach to grammar errors might seem a little unfair. After all, grammar has nothing to do with job performance, or creativity, or intelligence, right?

Wrong. If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use "it's," then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with. So, even in this hyper-competitive market, I will pass on a great programmer who cannot write.

Grammar signifies more than just a person's ability to remember high school English. I've found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts.

In the same vein, programmers who pay attention to how they construct written language also tend to pay a lot more attention to how they code. You see, at its core, code is prose. Great programmers are more than just code monkeys; according to Stanford programming legend Donald Knuth they are "essayists who work with traditional aesthetic and literary forms." The point: programming should be easily understood by real human beings — not just computers.

And just like good writing and good grammar, when it comes to programming, the devil's in the details. In fact, when it comes to my whole business, details are everything.

I hire people who care about those details. Applicants who don't think writing is important are likely to think lots of other (important) things also aren't important. And I guarantee that even if other companies aren't issuing grammar tests, they pay attention to sloppy mistakes on résumés. After all, sloppy is as sloppy does.

That's why I grammar test people who walk in the door looking for a job. Grammar is my litmus test. All applicants say they're detail-oriented; I just make my employees prove it.

[[Editors' note: If you're interested in improving your writing skills, please consider our Guide to Better Business Writing book]]

Read the summary of the #HBRchat on Twitter based on this blog post.