This week I had two pieces over at BNET as usual. I’ll be bumping this up to 3x a week in May, so please send your ideas! Seriously. I need ideas. What would you like to read about? The blog broadly covers time management, career, productivity, workplace and social trends. This week we had pieces on two books.

On Tuesday, I told readers that “Yes, You Have Time To Write That Novel.” Jael McHenry’s debut novel, The Kitchen Daughter, is out from Simon & Schuster this week. She wrote the book while holding down a full time marketing job that required her in-office presence for 40-50 hours a week. So where did she find the time? Where you’d imagine: nights, weekends, holidays. She seized weekends when she could work in a concentrated fashion, cranking out 10,000 words at a time. Six such weekends gives you a draft, if a crappy first draft (Anne Lamott uses stronger language). Editing can be done in spurts of 15 minutes after that. I thought it was good advice for tackling any big extracurricular project.

Then today, I wrote about “5 Skills You Can Learn From a Low-Wage Job.” After journalist Caitlin Kelly lost her job at the New York Daily News, she wanted both steady income and an escape from the solitude of freelance life. So she took a part-time job at The North Face in a suburban mall. She had a mixed experience with it (as her book, Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail, out today, recounts). There are some upsides to a job like this — solving people’s problems, for instance. Many white-collar jobs involve vague work and being removed from anything that actually does anything, whereas when someone needs hiking boots and you help them buy the right hiking boots, you have changed something in the world for the better. On the other hand, it’s tough work, as I can attest from my stints working at a mall drug store years ago. You’re on your feet for a long, long time.

I think there are several lessons one can learn from such a job, that I worry many people don’t learn. The competition to get into top colleges is really stiff these days, as, frankly, is the competition for low-wage but steady jobs. If I’m a store manager, I’d rather hire a 25-year-old who might stick around than a 17-year-old, who I know won’t, and probably lacks a lot of common sense anyway. So many well-to-do teens don’t wind up working in malls over the summer and on weekends. They do other things, like volunteer in Africa to learn about the world for their college essays. Well, some part of the world — and it will probably make for good stories in Davos later on. It may not have much to do with the employees in the companies they’ll eventually be running, though.

Of course, that said, one topic I cover in Laughing at the Joneses is whether I’d ever make Jasper and Sam work in those kinds of jobs. Probably not. It’s not that I don’t think they should work. But even as a teenager, one can develop marketable skills to do something more clearly applicable to a long-term career. At age 19, I started freelancing professionally. My little brother did even better, learning computer skills to build websites and the like. He never had to work in a drug store. And he’s continued doing software engineering professionally. So that was clearly good preparation.

What do you think? Do you think your children should work burger-flipping or shirt-folding jobs as teenagers? Why or why not?

Next up: Over at The Simple Dollar, Trent posts a review of 168 Hours. The review is one of the reasons I love the internet. In a print (on dead tree) review, you’d never be able to post chapter abstracts due to limited space, but this is actually quite helpful to readers figuring out if they want to read a book. Instead of just telling the overall theme, you see if there are specific issues that chapters will address that you find pertinent. I wish more people did this. Anyway, Trent was very kind, summing up the book as such:

The idea that we’re under a “time crunch” is a myth. The real crisis all of us are under is more along the lines of misuse of time. We spend our time doing things that aren’t very high on our real personal priority list. It’s not just the time we waste doing unimportant stuff. It’s also the time we spend being productive towards ends that really don’t mean very much in our life.

Trent has grasped the key distinction. Frankly, I don’t think the real time suck in life is the fact that you played Angry Birds for an hour last night. The real time suck is if you’re in the wrong job, or if you’re telling yourself that parents just can’t do things like play the piano or write novels or actually have fun with their kids because it’s more important that they clean the house or pack lunches. So please tweet and FB share that link around!

As usual, I have two BNET posts up this week. It is actually possible I might cross 100,000 visits at that blog this month, so I’d appreciate your comments and FB “likes” on these posts as well. On Tuesday, I asked “What’s Your Minimum Wage?” Drawing on the Money Saving Mom’s post last fall on “Why I Don’t Make Homemade Tortillas,” I discussed the idea that time has an opportunity cost. When you do things yourself in order to save money, it’s important to look at how much time it takes you. If you’re saving $2/hour, this is way below the federal minimum wage. Which is fine if you love doing whatever it is. But if you’re trying to save money, you should actually save money. (A more provocative question: why do people who bill $100/hour wait in a 30-minute line on Ben & Jerry’s free cone day?)

Anyway, as usual, I heard from people who seem to think I misunderstand opportunity cost. They insist that people are only willing to pay them $40/hour between 8AM and 5PM, and hence their time outside the workday has no value. This reminds me that I need to be sure to explain the concept well in Plenty. It is intuitive to me since I work for myself and work by the project, so any given hour can be pretty clearly translated into extra cash if I wanted. I understand how people who have salaries and set hours might not see this as clearly. But, in short, if you could moonlight or freelance, if you could work overtime or a second job, if you could spend an hour figuring out how you’d ask for a raise, or a few evenings pondering how you’d score your next promotion, or even if you just value your leisure time because you work hard then yes, your time outside 8AM to 5PM has an opportunity cost as well. Saving $2/hour by making your own tortillas is not its highest value use.

Then on Thursday, I asked “What Makes A Company A Cool Place To Work?” Yet another survey has found that Google is the most awesome place ever. A full 25% of young professionals said it was their ideal employer. But this makes no sense. No where close to 25% of us are software engineers, and yes there are support and sales and management roles at Google, but not all of us do that either. If you’re a musician, architect, botanist, writer, or any of a host of other lines of work, Google is not going to be your ideal employer. What surveys like this one (which listed Google, Apple and Walt Disney as the top three employers) really constitute is a popularity contest. I’ve used products from all three companies this morning, as have many people. But name recognition does not, by itself, make some place the right employer for you.

Finally, a little creative writing:

Tantrum

Outside, winter sits like a cough that’s stayed too long.

Slush lingers past the ides of March and everywhere people grip their coats.

Inside, the boy snatches at drugstore Easter eggs.

At eye level, there and not for taking, she says to his screaming,

not for taking,

not yet.

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Seldom these days does a book on self-development blow me away. I’m not sure whether that’s a product of reading hundreds of them and little seems new to me any more, or it may just be because I’m a bitter old cynic. For various reasons …[he lists various books] …have all been recently started with the intention of reviewing here, but then put down before the end because I was either not enjoying them or getting no discernible benefit. The same cannot be said for Laura Vanderkam’s excellent book ‘168 Hours You Have More Time Than You Think.’

Tim goes on to joke about my admission that I have over 30,000 emails in my inbox and don’t care. “That’s right, a productivity expert that doesn’t file her e-mails Heresy! Call the Productivity Police now and let’s string her up now!” I really like the idea of the Productivity Police.

Perhaps there should also be a Clutter Police — they might string me up too, but at least Lorie Marrero of The Clutter Diet enjoyed 168 Hours! Over at her blog, Marrero chronicles how she kept a time log for a week. As she writes:

I would like to challenge everyone to keep a time log for at least one week– it is very eye-opening! It forces you to examine where your time actually goes, and it also makes you more focused on what you’re doing.

My thoughts exactly.

Another great testimonial came via Elizabeth Simon Feldman’s Kicking the Moon blog. Feldman writes:

I am a voracious, but picky reader and in order for me to spend time reading something, it better be worth it. This book was worth every minute. It is well-organized, and smartly written with practical tips and tools to make the most of the time you have.

Finally, Modern Mom ran a guest post from me called “The No Housework Week,” on how to get your cooking and cleaning chores done in the least amount of time (usually by just not doing them). The piece was highlighted on the front page and sent out to Modern Mom’s 37,000 Twitter followers, so thanks to them for the great opportunity to get the word out.

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