planner scribbles

conspicuous missing words from mobile phone T9 vocabulary

2006-07-09T17:34:00.000-07:00

My Sony Ericsson K750i doesn't know the word "giraffe" in it. Neither does my friend's Nokia. I want to know why this is, and also, what other conspicuous missing words people have found from their predictive text handsets.

I also found "moping" to be missing.

technorati tags:missing, words, vocabulary, k750i, mobile, texting, sms, t9, dictionary

drawing triangles by Russell Davies

2005-11-15T10:10:00.000-08:00

Planning superstar and very nice guy Russell Davies did an excellent video tutorial on drawing triangles on his website. Funny too.

no. 1 - why don't some people fill in their timesheets?

2005-11-14T16:54:00.000-08:00

Why don’t some people do their timesheets? Because I thought that some people would be really good at it, but turn out to be bad, and vice versa.

Who? HR manager
Conversation time: 2 minutes
Chart type: 2x2 grid plot

I guess there are 2 factors. One is simply if people are used to doing it – at an old agency or they simply have a good line manager who has made them do it from day 1. Ingrained behaviour is hard to change, so this would be an important factor in generalising who does and doesn’t. This was the y-axis (up-axis) of my chart.

Then I guess the other factor is the kind of person they are with regard to this kind of thing – I guess a general respect for admin. This would be made up of a number of related things like, maverickness vs buttoned downedness, are they a respecter or rejecter of systems/authority and so on. These would be borne out in personality traits, and we could try plot this on the x-axis.

I then plotted myself as to where I lay on the chart – the weak bottom left section – and sure enough I am 4 weeks behind on timesheets. A resounding success for the model.

welcome to planner scribbles

2005-11-14T16:50:00.000-08:00

I’m an advertising account planner. It’s a geeky in-joke that planners draw diagrams the whole time when they’re talking about the simplest things. It’s actually true though, and I have caught myself doing it more than a couple of times now.

So I thought I would create a blog that just featured the diagrams that end up on my desk when people have asked me stuff. Ideally they will be insightful and useful ways of conceptualising things, but I am guessing they will be mostly frivolous or ironic. They will all be real diagrams done by real planners in real situations though.

If you'd like to contribute a diagram with explanation, email it in. I'm all for collaboration - let me know if you'd like to join this blog too, and I'll add you.

Hopefully by blogging about it, we’ll pay more attention to it, and thus produce better diagrams, which is a surefire way ahead in planning.

Enough chat – hard to understand without a diagram.