What worked for me (and I'm assuming the original question refers to a personal project) is to start working with someone else wanting to achieve a similar goal.
Meet once a week. Analyze what you've accomplished over the last week. Outline what you're going to do over the next week.
Don't spend the meeting doing too much project design/planning--delegate that to be done over the week, then discuss it via email or during the meeting.
The accountability helps, but what really helps is having someone else who actually cares about the project enough to provide feedback, interest, and support.
This memo just makes him sound like one of those office horror stories. You know the kind: doesn't take interest in things, but flips out over randomly when they do take interest and then starts making knee-jerk decisions/vetoes. The kind that makes their employees keep information from them because they don't know which minor detail is going to get them chewed out today.
Not that he doesn't have a valid point, but there might be technical/security/business reasons or time and resource limitations that caused this problem. Yeah, Windows Update is scary, but it's probably designed to convince people to keep their computers up-to-date in the interest of security. WMM download and installation is difficult, but maybe that's because it's been treated like an afterthought and not given the priority it deserves. Who knows.
Point is, you need to identify *why* things went wrong and correct them from there. This is the type of email that would scare a subordinate into coming up with a kludgy or short-sighted fix because he doesn't want to incur any further wrath.
This is true. I'm highly skeptical because my parents are very skeptical. Unfortunately, I think their mindset came from experience rather than training.
Of course this makes me a very negative and paranoid person. Sometimes it's hard to evaluate something correctly if you start looking at all the ways it can go wrong. And most people don't like it when your response to everything is "yeah, but *actually*..."--I've gotten the reputation for being a big kill-joy.
Which is probably one of the reasons no one wants to teach kids a healthy dose of skepticism--it's sort of depressing.
I wouldn't think gaming SEO is a definite indicator of other unethical behavior, because I imagine a lot of people who hire black-hat SEOs just don't understand search engines enough to know what's ethical in that realm. (It might be an indicator of bad or uninformed management in that case, but that's another issue entirely.)
Whether they care what's ethical, that's also another story. However, given the nature of search engines and most people's understanding of how they work, I imagine this sort of activity would be easier to justify than most other unethical acts.
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What worked for me (and I'm assuming the original question refers to a personal project) is to start working with someone else wanting to achieve a similar goal.
Meet once a week. Analyze what you've accomplished over the last week. Outline what you're going to do over the next week.
Don't spend the meeting doing too much project design/planning--delegate that to be done over the week, then discuss it via email or during the meeting.
The accountability helps, but what really helps is having someone else who actually cares about the project enough to provide feedback, interest, and support.
This memo just makes him sound like one of those office horror stories. You know the kind: doesn't take interest in things, but flips out over randomly when they do take interest and then starts making knee-jerk decisions/vetoes. The kind that makes their employees keep information from them because they don't know which minor detail is going to get them chewed out today.
Not that he doesn't have a valid point, but there might be technical/security/business reasons or time and resource limitations that caused this problem. Yeah, Windows Update is scary, but it's probably designed to convince people to keep their computers up-to-date in the interest of security. WMM download and installation is difficult, but maybe that's because it's been treated like an afterthought and not given the priority it deserves. Who knows.
Point is, you need to identify *why* things went wrong and correct them from there. This is the type of email that would scare a subordinate into coming up with a kludgy or short-sighted fix because he doesn't want to incur any further wrath.
Or maybe I'm just getting burnt out and bitter.
This is true. I'm highly skeptical because my parents are very skeptical. Unfortunately, I think their mindset came from experience rather than training.
Of course this makes me a very negative and paranoid person. Sometimes it's hard to evaluate something correctly if you start looking at all the ways it can go wrong. And most people don't like it when your response to everything is "yeah, but *actually*..."--I've gotten the reputation for being a big kill-joy.
Which is probably one of the reasons no one wants to teach kids a healthy dose of skepticism--it's sort of depressing.
I wouldn't think gaming SEO is a definite indicator of other unethical behavior, because I imagine a lot of people who hire black-hat SEOs just don't understand search engines enough to know what's ethical in that realm. (It might be an indicator of bad or uninformed management in that case, but that's another issue entirely.)
Whether they care what's ethical, that's also another story. However, given the nature of search engines and most people's understanding of how they work, I imagine this sort of activity would be easier to justify than most other unethical acts.