[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“3181”] Image by Jacob Bøtter  used under Creative Commons License [/caption]

We live in hectic times. For most of us, there will always be more work than hours in a day and we need to find some mechanism to prioritize work and stay sane.

There are hundreds of books on time management (my personal preference is the Getting Things Done methodology by David Allen).

Regardless of your chosen time management framework, there is an important time management principle called the 80/20 principle. This principle applies to work and life. It shows how effort and effort value are not balanced.

Remember student life

Most students know that they spend only the last few days ,before the finals, cramming and getting ready. Most often this yield’s the desired grade and you move on. This means that the little sprint at the end yielded the desired result. You could have studied religious every week for the entire semester and you probably would have achieved the same or very similar level of performance.

Business profits

In most businesses, 20% of the products/services yield 80% of the profits.

The 80/20 rule

The rule is that (roughly) 80% of the desired results will be generated by 20% of the effort.

Typically a small number of decisions/work effort result in the biggest gains for the organization.

The purpose of this framework isn’t to argue an exact split. Most people call it the 80/20 rule but the actual split can be 70/30 or 99/1.

The imbalance is everywhere even in linguistics

Imbalance is everywhere. You deal with it daily without realizing it. Sir Isaac Pitman discovered that 700 of the most common English language words make up 2/3 of every conversation. By extending the definition to include derivatives of those words, the ratio becomes almost 80%.

How it applies to your work

If we assume that this phenomenon is real and then apply it to your work, it means 80% of your time is spent on activities that generate very little return or value.

Think of all the activities you participate in today (or you cause to happen if you are the boss) that steal valuable productivity such as meetings, reports, etc.

My accepting this simple fact as valid, you can start asking yourself which of your calendar bookings are likely a waste of your time (aka they generate the least amount of value).

Large fast food chains try to iron out inefficiencies through carefully analyzed time and motion studies. You can do the same quickly by just thinking about value and trying to optimize your time.

Look at your company profits

List all of your company products/services and rank them by profits generated. You will likely find that 20% of your products/services generate the bulk (maybe 80% or so) of your profits.

By knowing this, you can prioritize these in the short term and ensure your teams are maximizing value by pushing and investing in these lines. It is also a chance to perform some risk assessment and determine what risks exist for these products and how you can react.

You may even decide to cut down on your less valuable products/services this reducing corporate complexity and overhead. In some cases making you a more nimble and reactive organization. In study after study, we see that the least complex organizations typically perform the best.

A tool when negotiating

When preparing to negotiate, each side will produce a list of desired outcomes. If you prepare your list by keeping the 80/20 rule in mind, you will be able to narrowly focus on what really matters to your organization. This narrower list also gives you more room to manoeuver because you can concede on some of the less important elements.

A tool when targeting customers

By knowing which 20% of customers generate 80% of your profits, you can concentrate your marketing dollars more intelligently. You can also ensure that you provide incredible customer service for these important customers and make them feel special.

The 80/20 rule in life

This rule also applies to your personal life. It means that some personal relationships are more important (more rewarding) than others. A simple way of looking at this is that 20% of your friends generate 80% of friendship value (joy, support, etc.).

When applied to friends, it is less mathematical and more introspectual but is a fantastic exercise. Are you spending your time with the people giving the most back to you?

I recommend everyone plan a couple of days every 6 months to sit and perform some deep introspection. This is a valuable time when you can decide where you want to be in 5/10/20 years. It gives you a chance to take a snapshot of your as-is situation and determine if you are where you thought you would be by now. Now add to this the 80/20 rule. 20% of actions delivery 80% of your life satisfaction. Figure out the “stuff” that is less valuable and try to change it. If work is not contributing to your overall life satisfaction then make a plan to change it. If your relationship with your partner isn’t contributing to your overall life satisfaction then make a remediation plan (counselling, honest discussions, or in extreme cases separation).

Remember that 80% of your life satisfaction comes from 20% of your activities. Try to waste less time with the other 80% of your time by replacing it with better more rewarding “things”.

The 80/20 rule in time management

Many executives I have worked with typically run after the work that is the loudest or seems the most urgent. In Getting Things Done, you learn to capture all open loops (commitments of work not yet completed) and then use this list to prioritize your work for the upcoming days, weeks and months.

If you apply 80/20 thinking to GTD, you will highlight the activities that actually generate the most “bang for your buck” and push everything else down the list.

Conclusion

This is a very simple concept to understand but much harder to implement. It is powerful because of its simplicity and it has proven to work over and over. Trust in its power and use it.

In addition to Information Security, I have negotiated hundreds of contracts over the last 20 years totalling in the billions of dollars.

There are many schools teaching different “techniques” but the worst of the worst are those that have a win/lose strategy. These dinosaurs negotiations models believe in “winning at all costs” and are very easy to spot in the wild.

Techniques of the stupid negotiator

The win/lose strategy negotiators are the stupidest of the bunch. As previously mentioned, the techniques are easy to spot and I wanted to share some of them with you here:

• lowballing They typically start the negotiations with unreasonably low bids and then never make significant concessions. They make small insignificant moves. Any flexibility on your part is seen as a sign of weakness and will fuel their “cheapness”.

• no authority negotiators They typically send low-level henchmen into the negotiations and do not give them any authority to make concessions. This means every request has to be sent back to the home base for analysis making the process painfully slow.

• Emotional attacks They typically see emotions as a weakness and will use it against you. This means they may try to bully you. Walk out of the talks at various points in the negotiations infuriated by something you requested. In extreme cases they may use someone of the opposite sex who will break down (often crying) during the negotiations to “win” the negotiations.

Now that you know some of their tactics, you will quickly realize you are negotiating with the “stupid” negotiator and typically you may want to simply walk away and find other options. If other options are not available, ensure you clearly set your negotiation parameters ahead of time (minimum price, volume, important terms, etc.) and ensure you stick to them. Don’t allow yourself to be played.

There is no pie

In this 1980’s style of negotiation (the stupid win/lose style), participants believe that there is a finite amount of pie and that you must fight to win the biggest piece.

The problem is that with this style of negotiations, both parties typically end up with sub-optimal results regardless of who actually “won” the negotiations.

Modern negotiations

The modern negotiator understands that the best outcome is a win/win scenario where the needs of each party are met as much as possible. A good healthy negotiation means everyone wins and everyone is optimally satisfied.

Let’s say you need to acquire outsource IT services and you manage to beat a vendor over the head and “convince” them to accept an unreasonably low rate. You may think you won because you got a “good price” but the reality the vendor will now do everything to cut corners to control costs. This means they will spend all their energy cutting, negotiating and arguing instead of figuring out how to help optimize service delivery.

The secret to modern negotiation

There is one undeniable secret weapon in the modern negotiators arsenal : trust. Without trust, there cannot be a win/win negotiation.

This means that even before you start “negotiating”, it is important to build a relationship with the other party. Spend the time to learn about each participants goals and needs. Figure out what brings them to the table and what the ideal outcome would be for them. You need to trust them and they need to trust you.

Let’s get back to stupid

I want to share with you some of the most used techniques by these badly trained old age stupid negotiators. My hope is by knowing their techniques, you will be better able to react and ultimately win.

Power of the negotiator

Every participant has different sources of power available to them during the negotiation.

In your office life, when negotiating with your boss, he/she has the power to reward or punish you. But often the levers of power are much more subtle and not always known (there is rarely perfect information).

Power can come from desperation, power of precedents (knowing someone else that got a specific deal), power of expertise, power of credentials, etc.

The message here is that you should ensure you have prepared all possible power sources. Additionally it is important to remember that power is perceived power and not absolute. You may think you are entitled to the same deal as another similar company (power of precedents) but may not realize they bought twice as much as you or that they brought another deal to the table.

Get the other party to invest

Every economics student learns about the concept of sunk costs. Wikipedia defines it as “In economics and business decision-making, a sunk cost is a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered.” In Economics 101 we learn that sunk costs should not impact our analysis of continuing or killing a project.

Unprepared investors often make this mistake. They sink thousands into a stock whose price keeps dropping. Instead of limiting their losses and “getting out”, they keep adding to their losing position hoping it will turn around. They are using the sunk cost (all the investments up to this point) as a major deciding factor, whereas they should make a clear analytical decision on the chances the stock will actually appreciate from this point on regardless of these sunk costs.

One technique is to get the other party to invest heavily in the negotiations process. When buying a car, this could be “forcing” the sales rep to show you every car in the dealership, then test drive everyone, give you a detailed walk-through of every car, etc. When you finally are ready to make a decision a couple of days later, he will likely bend over backwards because of all the time he has already invested.

In a corporate environment, if you extend the negotiation process and the sales team has flown in from out of town, they may be more inclined to be “flexible” because they don’t want to walk away empty-handed.

This means that before you start the negotiations, you have an honest discussion with all stakeholders in your company and you agree on a common set of goals before ever walking into that boardroom. Know exactly what you want, what you are willing to invest, what you are willing to concede and agree that you will walk away if those conditions can’t be met.

Chance favours the prepared

The negotiation process starts much earlier than your first face to face meeting. Know the situation of your counterpart (aka do your homework). The more you know the better the outcome will be.

When negotiating a salary increase with your boss, the negotiation starts much earlier than the meeting where you ask for more money. It starts weeks before where you try to determine next year’s budget. You try to figure out how the company is doing and how that performance will exert pressure (if any) on your boss. You should check out the salary range for others doing your job in similar companies. You should figure out when your boss is more likely to be “happy and agreeable”. etc.. etc.. etc…

In a corporate negotiation scenario, some of this information collection may happen during the formal meetings. You should determine how much information you are willing to divulge, at what rate, when, how and to whom. Typically the counter-party will divulge some information but will then expect you to reciprocate accordingly. Are you willing to play ball? Make sure you determine this with your team before the counter-party ever shows up.

Time may be your friend

Any deadlines your counter-party may have could be used as an advantage. If you are negotiating with a supplier and know their end of quarter/end of year is in 2 weeks, but you have no such deadline, you come from a position of power. They may be willing to negotiate much more to ensure a deal closes within that window.

On the other hand, you may have a subscription licence with a fixed expiry date for a product critical to your business. If you wait too long and negotiate too close to that deadline, the OEM may not be flexible because they know you are working against the clock. And because time is tight, they may also assume alternatives are out of the question.

If you are working against a fixed deadline, start the negotiation as early as possible to ensure you are not bullied into a bad deal. If possible, prepare a plan B (alternative solution) that can be implemented if a reasonable deal cannot be reached. If the alternative is reasonable then the counter-party loses their position of authority and will likely be fairer.

Make it personal

Good negotiators know that making it personal generally helps your cause. Making it personal means being friendly and likeable. Make sure the counter-party sees you as human and not a big unfriendly grey corporation.

In extreme American jury based court cases, defendants have been declared not guilty, even though there is enough evidence to clearly assign blame. In these cases the jury sometimes sees the prosecutor as arrogant, mean, vindictive and “on a mission”.

Don’t be a prick. Always be kind and caring. Remain cool, calm and in control.

Whether I’m coaching a junior fresh out of school or a seasoned executive with 30 years of experience, almost everyone tells me they are overloaded and that their personal life is suffering.

We have been raised to separate (or try to at least) our work and personal lives. After all, they are very separate things.

Right? WRONG!

A good example is improving your health. Improving your health means eating better and exercising more but it also means reducing stress. So to holistically improve your health, your plan must include both personal actions and work time related actions.

Kanban

My last employer was large multinational manufacturing organization that benefitted greatly from the concepts of Kanban and Lean manufacturing.

Next time you walk into your local supermarket, look at the fresh produce section. How many products do they carry? The larger stores carry an impressive amount but they typically only carry products that they know will sell. Produce also has limited shelf life, so this means they order their products as close to the sale date as possible (predicting demand).

A key concept in Kanban is Just In Time ordering and manufacturing. Toyota, the creator or Kanban, used this Just in Time system to cut inventory costs and optimize the workflow, they set up visual board showing the assembly flow for the entire factory. If you walked into my last employer’s manufacturing site, every employee knew what would be worked on that day, how fast they would have to work and any potential issues that have been logged in the last 30/60 days. This visual information allowed the employees to work knowing what was coming and therefore made them more productive.

Kanban in your personal life

You are a person, so how does this apply? Regardless of your time management strategy of choice (mine is Getting Things Done), you need to “capture all of your open loops” and place them in a trusted system.

Related articles - The four truths about Getting Things Done (GTD)

• The Getting Things Done (GTD) Weekly Review Process

• The Getting Things Done Workflow (GTD)

• Getting Things Done may be the most important business skill

• How do I start using GTD?

By capturing everything you have committed to doing but haven’t already completed, you create a visual dashboard of everything in the “pipeline” and at the same time you benefit from clearing your mind.

Just In Time manufacturing in your personal life also means that you keep your actual “today workflow” (or Work In Progress tasks) to a bare minimum. There is no use trying to finish 24 things at the same time. By properly managing your to do list and then prioritizing appropriately, you are able to spend your time on the handful of most valuable activities.

Setting up your personal system

The main concept in Kanban is making the work visual. Anyone that has worked with me knows I need a whiteboard in the office and typically more than one.

My last whiteboard had these columns on it: - Capture (where everything not processed went) - Next Action (the very next actions for the chosen work to be done). This also included items I wanted to QA from my team before defining as completed. - Waiting for (when I was waiting for something from someone else) - Done this week (completed items I tabulated every week)

This is the visual part of Kanban and is step 1.

Step 2 is to ensure you have captured all of your open loops. Chose a method for capturing everything you have committed to but haven’t yet done so you can get it out of your head (capture everything from buying groceries to signing that multi-billion dollar contract).

Step 3 in the Kanban system is to determine an optimal yet realistic workflow rate. How much can you reasonably accomplish this hour/day/week?

Weekly Review & Kanban workflow

Before you start your weekly review, you must ensure all of your open loops are captured. To do this, I recommend going over your notes from meetings, capture column on your whiteboard, reviewing your calendar, going through your email and everywhere else you could have a task that you will need to accomplish.

Once it is captured, based on your high-level work/life goals, you can determine that are the most pressing X elements you should get done during this planning phase (can be daily but I recommend a weekly approach). Everything you commit to doing should go on your board in the next Actions column. Ultimately these will be the most important items. The items most aligned with your work and life goals.

You then pull work from the Next Action column, action it and complete it then move it to the Done column. By writing things you have completed, it is a positive reminder that things are moving in the right direction (we often forget). Every time you look at it, you will feel like you accomplished something and it will fuel your continued work.

Tracking

One important element of Kanban in our manufacturing environment was tracking of performance metrics to identify issues. The same applied to your personal implementation of Kanban.

You coloured markers and commitments to track deviations from expected performance. If you miss a due date, write it in red. If you notice something takes longer than expected, write it in orange, etc. At the end of the week (during your weekly review) you can review these metrics and figure out, “what’s going on”. Is it that something is taking you longer than expected regularly (i.e. financial review)? Maybe this is because you are lacking some of the required skills, you are improperly planning the work, etc. By knowing what deviated and why, you can implement a permanent corrective action.

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“800”] Image by king dams used under Creative Commons License [/caption]

We have been tracking an organized spearfishing attack occurring on LinkedIn since early October 2015. Since many of my contacts weren’t aware, I decided to publish this quick post.

This is a simple attack where a “bad actor” creates a fake LinkedIn page with actual connections. Pretending to be a recruiter, they encourage applicants to visit a special CV submission page which infects your computer with malware.

1. Always be weary of new connections on LinkedIn offering something interesting. Just because you have common connections doesn’t mean they are real or trustworthy.
2. When applying for a job, always visit the company website directly by entering the URL yourself (not clicking on a link) and visit the careers section.
3. Be careful and don’t be too trusting on the internet

Profiles

In the past, scammers had incomplete profiles with major language issues. In this attack, it seems the profiles are complete with full (fake) job history, education and even LinkedIn group memberships.

A quick analysis of a handful of these profiles reveals much of the content is stolen from valid pages. Images are stolen from the internet. Career summaries are stolen from valid LinkedIn users. Job history is stolen from actual job postings.

A series of these profiles are created and used to endorse each other making these profiles look authentic and trustworthy.

Attribution

Interestingly this attack seems to match activity discovered by Cylance in December 2014 in file called Operation Cleaver

The Cylance report lists domains being faked and we see some of those re-used in this attack. Domains include:

• Teledyne-Jobs.com
• Doosan-Job.com
• NorthropGrumman.net

To be clear there are other domains being used but these are examples of domains seen in the Cylance attack and the newer one.

Conclusion

The moral of the story is be careful. Treat your CV and personal information as valuable assets and protect them. Don't blindly trust anyone on the internet regardless of how "connected" they seem to be to your network. Don't trust endorsements.

   [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="598"]<img src="https://ekiledjian2.micro.blog/uploads/2025/eb7c38936f.jpg" alt=" Don't know where this came from originally or I would give proper attribution. ">  Don't know where this came from originally or I would give proper attribution. [/caption]

Right after the horribly tragic terror attacks in Paris, we started to read badly written articles by journalists trying to attract readers with sensational headlines.

The easiest target was encrypted communication tools and one of those is Telegram Messenger. It was said ISIS/ISIL used Telegram to chat securely and that they considered it a good solid secure and trustworthy platform. Does it really deserve that reputation?

I wrote a article on March 2014 that explained some of the shortcomings of this messaging platform.

With all the publicity it is receiving now, I wanted to revisit the tool.

Some of the security issues for people wanting the best security available:

• Uploading your contacts In order to register for Telegram, you have to use your real telephone number and upload your phonebook contacts (to find others that are using Telegram). This means they know with absolute certainty who owns each account and have a list of your contacts.

• Metadata Metadata Metadata With everything Snowden has released, we know what metadata is and why it is so important to protect. It is how governments around the world can build very accurate profiles of users. Most users will use Telegram Messenger via a smartphone which is a horribly leaking end point for metadata. Even if you encrypt the actual message, your provider, phone manufacturer and phone OS provider know what app is installed, when it was installed, how often it was used, when it was used and for how long. Combining this with triangulated location information and general information collection means tracking down individual users becomes much easier for crafty well-funded hackers or governments.

• Custom encryption Read my original article about Telegrams custom encryption. We are at a point in Information Security where there are well documented, tried, tested and reliable encryption mechanisms and it is strange that a company comes along and creates it own. This becomes especially worrisome when the protocol and tool aren’t completely open sourced.

Looking back at Telecom

Looking back at Telegram 1 year after the original article, I would still rate its security as medium level. It may be better than the most popular platforms but is nowhere near a level I would call really secure.

What’s the most secure instant messaging tool?

I write a blog post entitled “The most secure smartphone messaging app in 2013 and my recommendation still stands. The most secure instant messaging tool available today is Threema. Key management is handled by each user (not by the platform provider which weakens the security). It’s security model and back end infrastructure has been independently vetted for security.

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“1200”] Image by PSParro  used under Creative Commons License [/caption]

Pushbullet is an immensely popular multi-platform (Chrome, Firefox, Windows, Mac, Android, IOS) app that allows you to push content from one device to another one (or multiple other ones). As a free service, it quickly became a de facto app on most power-user devices. Watch any technology podcast and you are sure to hear at least one of the hosts talk about it every now and then. It has over 170,000 installs on the Google Play store. Over 1.4M users on the Chrome browser. So by any account it can be considered a success. Except when it comes to profitability.

As a free app, it didn’t make any money and the developers had to assume the charges for all the development and back-end infrastructure.

Through a blog post on the company’s website this week the developer announced that they would launch a free tier at $5 a month ($40 a year). Most users understand that a non-profitable service won’t be around so they don’t mind paying a small fee to keep them going but never hold your users hostage.

What went wrong?

1. In order to create the Pro-tier and encourage users to become paying customers, they removed functionality from the free product.

2. They made the announcement November 17, 2015 and the new tier became effective December 1, 2015. They gave their users 2 weeks to decide on what to do.

3. They chose to charge $5 a month for their service which seems to be more than their customer base is prepared to pay.

Typically Reddit is a good barometer of a company’s biggest supporters / detractors. In this case reading [this] Reddit thread about the changes is enlightening and disquieting for Pushbullet.

The Overcast model

Overcast is my favourite IOS (iPhone and iPad) podcatcher. I bought version 1 as soon as it was released because everything the developer (Marco Arment) releases is fantastic. Overcast v1 was a fantastic app that offered a great feature set (especially at the pro level). In v2, Marco changed Overcast to a patronage model. This means the app is free with its full feature set for everyone, but the developer asks fans to please support him with any amount they feel comfortable with. Why did he do this? Because the 80% of his customers not paying for the pro version ended up with an inferior product.

The LastPass model

LastPass was my preferred password manager until they got acquired by LogMeIn. Their pricing model was to offer customers free access the product on one platform (desktop or smartphone) and then offer a premium tier with unlimited device support and additional functionality. Their base product is solid, secure and extremely competitive as a product. Their premium add-ons like unlimited device support and 2-factor authentication are nice incentives to entice customers to upgrade. Additionally they price the upgrade to $1 per month which makes the upgrade a no brainer for most.

Conclusion

I believe that the Pushbullet approach was ill-advised and crafted by inferior executives that don’t understand the market they are competing in. Even if Pushbullet were to reverse course, there will be “bad faith” held against them for a while. If they maintain their pricing model, they may end up losing too many customers and going under.

The lesson is to know your market and figure out the pricing strategy at the start of your business. Too many internet startups concentrate on “the good idea” and then end up folding or getting sold for pennies on the dollar.

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