Attention

In which the author throws away the stop-clock.

Tracking time is something lots of people do. Often they do this for billing, but some people also track their time just so they know what they are spending their time on. I propose a change to tracking your attention…

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Give + Take

Give + Take is a shop in East Dulwich. They took various ideas to do with recycling of clothes and other items and fused them to make a new concept shop – the “responsible boutique”. They make use of Twitter to advertise designer clothes, as they arrive, to an audience keen to bag a bargain.

We help Give + Take create a niche online brand and make their most desirable products accessible to people outside their local area. Hire us to make the jump from the high-street to the web.

Bell Pottinger Sans Frontieres

Bell Pottinger Sans Frontieres are in the industry of changing industries. They bring four decades of international communications experience, we understand how communication is being shaped by those who have grown up with the web.

We help BPSF make the web a part of their strategies. Hire us to give you an online perspective.

SweetSpot

SweetSpot are a start-up lettings company aiming to raise the standard of the student property market by making the entire experience of renting as simple, well-crafted and transparent as possible. They are making their service, both online and off, as exceptional as possible, in stark contrast to an industry synonymous with low-quality, profit-motivated development.

We help SweetSpot achieve their aspirations by targeting the lettings process, which is difficult and time-consuming for everyone. We put it online and made it simple. Hire us to move your manual processes online.

Describing the Living Document

In which the author considers the ways in which we might shed the paper chains of analogue media and be reborn into a world of contemplative lucidity.

Our minds have a tendency to comprehend new concepts and new conditions through metaphor. A thing which cannot yet be understood is framed in the terms of things which can. So it is with the history of the user-interface. In order to appeal to a broader market, the language and the processes of the familiar were applied to the operation of computers. In this case the familiar terms were adopted from the world of work, and so we refer to such comfortable abstractions as desktops, files, folders, trashcans, that kind of thing. Because we already understand these things, we use them as a layer of abstraction to make intuitive the things we do not understand. This metaphor is called the Paper Paradigm…

Read the rest of this essay at HowToWork.withjandj.com

Markup

In which the author requests project managers and contractors to quantify their contribution to a project, and not lazily add markup on top of everyone else.

My Dad has run a building company as long I have been alive. The general principle for coming up with a quote for a building job is very simple. Look at a house extension for example. You look in your Rolodex (assuming it’s the 80’s) for a bunch of subcontractors with the specialist skills you need, in this case probably joinery, plumbing, painting & decorating, quantity surveying (predicting the number of bricks you’ll need), brick-laying, electrics, and maybe gas. You ask them all to send you quotes for how much the job will cost; they do so, and most of the time you pick the cheapest one. All the subcontractor costs get added together, you pop a healthy margin of, say, 10-15% on top, and you send that as a quote to the client. It is likely that you will be one of several contractors sending quotes to the client, and it is likely that the client will also be picking the cheapest one – you have to be careful with that 10-15%…

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Outside the Office

In which the author appreciates the difference between web content and the document and, in so doing, finds modern collaboration systems unusable.

I’ve been interested in collaboration systems for a long time. As in, the software that companies deploy to make their employees work more effectively together. I’ve tried lots of them – Basecamp and Sharepoint are pretty representative of the model: have a bit of task list, a bit of calendar, a bit of wiki, give everyone an account, split the content into projects, and away you go. There have been many, many copycats in this field, but the systems all seem to revolve around this mix of tasks, dates and documents…

Read the rest of this essay at HowToWork.withjandj.com

Hire J&J

J&J recognise that changing your industry can be a risky endeavour. Working with J&J, you can expect to gain a partner to tip the scales in your favour.

hello@withjandj.com

Ambit

Psychiatric training manuals are generally left on the shelf. Dickon and his AMBIT project team have turned these tomes into evolving tools for clinical practice, made local and relevant by the teams that update them. This means better care for the young people they treat.

We help Dickon create interactive practice manuals. Hire us to create the tools you need to change your working culture.

Avox

Avox provide accurate information on companies in an industry where having 20% erroneous records is considered the norm. By opening their database to the public and encouraging corrections, they are growing beyond what they could achieve internally, to challenge the scale of the industry’s heavyweights.

We help Avox open up their data for consumption, expansion and improvement by their community. Hire us to help you benefit from opening your data to your community.

Jeroboams En Primeur

En Primeur wines are usually promoted and sold by private sales teams with lists of phone numbers, email addresses and experts’ scores. Jeroboams turned this around with their 2010 and 2011 campaigns, aggregating reviews on their site and prompting customers to create wish-lists of wines.

We help Jeroboams’ customers make a small commitment so the sales team are able to use their time to make targeted calls that lead to more sales. Hire us to make your customers come to you.

What on Earth Books

Christoper Lloyd set up What On Earth Books to publish his grandest work to date in 2009, after two successful runs with Bloomsbury. Three books on, they are demonstrating that you don’t need a big publisher behind you to act like one.

We help What on Earth Books to sell books without the machinery of a traditional publisher. Hire us to help you succeed in an industry dominated by middlemen.