Research In Motion (RIM) is best known for making the BlackBerry. In the early days of the company, RIM focused on reducing the BlackBerry’s power consumption. The engineers put up a sign:
Have you saved a milliwatt today?
This was a specific, reasonable challenge. Instead of some nebulous exhortation to corporate greatness, something worthy of a Dilbert cartoon, they asked engineers to reduce power consumption by a milliwatt.
What’s your equivalent of saving a milliwatt?
Related post:
have you spent a dollar on something that might help make this a better world?
This resonated with several advices from Nine Things Successful People Do Differently: get specific, focus on getting better, rather than being good, and the rest of them.
My equivalent of saving a milliwatt is spending time with my kids.
I try to commit a useful change to at least one of the open source projects I’m involved with every day.