Farnham reports that the list of agencies that serve liquor on the premises include names such as BBDO, TBWA/Chiat/Day, Grey Group, and Mindshare. Two other standouts include J. Walter Thompson, which reportedly boasts a 50-foot bar, and Kirshenbaum, Bond, Senecal + Partners, which creates advertisements for Glenfiddich whisky and Hendricks gin, among other liquors.

Company representatives say that most of the imbibing takes place after the day's work is done. And others say the drinks can help take the sting out of workdays that can easily extend past 12 hours.

 
But another common theme is the idea that drinking on the job helps co-workers bond — and it can also spark creative solutions.

"Once you are Turing'd it is much easier to believe other occupations which we humans used to do uniquely, can be done by computers. You tend to be open to disruptive technology in all parts of your life."

I’ve been thinking more about how I review a design – both my own and someone else’s. So over the past couple days I’ve been writing down every question I’ve been asking when I look at a design-in-progress. Some of these I say out loud, some just go through my head, some are in person, others are posted to Basecamp or Campfire.

I’ve hired my fair share of people now (fired them too) and having been through the ringer of young-person-just-starting-out close to a half dozen times, I figure I know it better than just about anyone. You’re scared but overconfident, clueless but eager to learn, just glad to be given a shot. I tried to think of a few things I wish I’d been told when I was just starting, things that would have saved me from screwing up. These are the things I still tell myself.

I used to love to write. As a child I used to write all the time. I loved to write up until the second I got my first professional writing job. It turns out it’s not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly slothful. Practically inert. I have no energy. I never have. I just have no desire to be productive. Now that I realize I don’t hate to write, that I just hate to work, it makes writing easier.

This triaging technique is aimed at quickly working through a long list of e-mail and deciding which e-mails need your attention now, and which ones can wait until later. By the end of this post you’ll know how to triage each new e-mail with a couple quick clicks and you will have easy access to the messages that need your attention throughout the day.

And that’s the greatest lie of the Noise. The idea that listening and reacting to the Noise is significant progress. Yes, these small bits of work we do all day are essential to getting things done, but go back to your last big vacation. After the first three days of decompression, when you were sitting in that hammock with a glass of red wine, under that oak tree that is older than anyone you know… tell me what you were thinking about. Was it the 27 bugs you left in an unverified state, or was it the epiphany that in the first three decades of your life you haven’t come close to building something as impressive as this damned oak tree?

You know what we’ve found? Magical things happen when employees know they’ll get to be king for a week. Gone is the complaining about what management is forcing them to do, because rotating management gives them a clear perspective of both sides of the fence. Employees will step up and grow if you give them the chance.

If you’d like to work from home but your company doesn’t currently allow it, why not become the prime mover and first member of a pilot program to see if working from home can’t help boost productivity? It should be easier now than ever to make the argument to the decision makers in your organization.

In this blog post I want to continue the let's help make your day-to-day life better path. I'll share three advanced segments that I personally find to be of value in the process of moving from data to actionable insights. I hope you'll download and use these segments, but more than that I hope you'll learn how to create delightful analytics segments with the options you have at your disposal.

Don’t depend on Delicious; host your own, pay for it elsewhere, or hope for the best. Use real-time feeds to stitch the bookmarking diaspora back together into topical aggregate indexes.

A follow on from my pie-chart making script for OmniGraffle, this one makes bar charts.
Really just quickly thrown together, but it produces the results I was hoping for. Obviously, use at your own risk, and maybe save any OmniGraffle documents you have open before you run it.

Nordstrom’s employee handbook used to be presented on a single 5 x 8 card:

Last Day at the Office Emails catalogs and details the parting shots of people on their last day at work. In this post, we learn tested techniques from Pulitzer Prize winner Dan Neil's goodbye to the L.A. Times.

“I’m taking a month off of work to learn everything I can about the brain." (This is a great post.) http://bit.ly/cCvnpl

Writing a novel, research paper, script or any long-form text involves more than hammering away at the keys until you reach the end. Collecting research, ordering fragmented ideas, shuffling index cards in search of that elusive structure - most writing software is fired up only after much of the hard work is done. Enter Scrivener: a word processor and project management tool that stays with you from that first, unformed idea all the way through to the final draft. Outline and structure your ideas, take notes, view research alongside your writing and compose the constituent pieces of your text in isolation or in context. Scrivener won't tell you how to write - it just makes all the tools you have scattered around your desk available in one application, leaving you free to focus on the words.

A working mother's guide to writing a novel: http://lat.ms/a29g5n

Here’s what I’ve been doing–or at least trying to do–to stay healthy and sane while working on a startup. It’s not rocket science. It may work for you, and it may not. But these strategies have been helpful for me, so I thought I’d share, in hopes that others have an easier time of it.

I'll be leaving my job soon and will have to turn in my work laptop. How can I get my laptop sparkling clean so I can preserve my privacy and avoid runing afoul of IT or any corporate policies?

As some people here don’t care about making their living from the internet, I understand that this post will not be for everybody. However, if you’ve just made the leap to working for yourself, currently run your own business, or you’re looking to make your money online in the future, this article may be just what you need. Over the last 18 months of working for myself, I’ve learned a ton of things on my journey. Not every piece of advice I took on board has helped, with many ideas quickly being discarded. From reading dozens of books, speaking with hundreds of entrepreneurs, and living this life myself for a year and a half, there are a few lessons I would like to share.

What will live with me as much as any individual session, though, is the place itself. Google's home is a campus, and being there is a "total" experience: if you work there, you can enjoy a gymnasium, sunny courtyards, beach volleyball, endless tech toys, laundry facilities and three excellent meals a day on site. As one employee explained it, workers are treated "like adults"—trusted to work and play hard, pursuing their projects in their own time. In another sense, of course, this also means they are treated like schoolchildren, or at least like members of a politely paternal institution—liberated from mundane concerns the better to learn and perform.

This Book helps you to move into the Digital era of awesomeness. Download it for free: http://bit.ly/4R9rth

Graphic designer Glaser shares 10 nuggets of wisdom from his long and successful career.

"Presidential candidates are calling for tougher labor standards in trade agreements. But can such standards be enforced? Here's what I learned from my old job."

Summary of four types of people management.

"Tips For Students with a Bachelors in Computer Science" - but relevant for many more.

"I decided to explore the idea of freelancing when several people from the office complimented my writing one after the other. My problem was that I had no idea what I wanted to do exactly. Yes, it was going to involve writing of some sorts. I discovered I had a knack for words (my boss even trusted me to write a press release about a new product we were launching — not bad for someone 6 months out of university!) but I had never been specifically hired and paid by others just to 'write stuff.'"