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Notes from the Field: Our Very Own Top Ten

The media have been bombarding all of us lately with "Top 10" lists of all kinds – the best and the worst of the year (news story, film, joke, celebrity gaffe, etc.), the best and worst of the past decade, and on and on.

So, not to be outdone, we thought it would be interesting—and perhaps even useful—to go back and check on what were our most widely-read articles in 2009.

Publishing a newsletter is a strange business. We write about what we think is important and/or interesting, but we never really know how our readers as a whole respond to our rants and raves. Occasionally a few of you will shoot an email back to us with a comment (sometimes agreeing with us, often challenging our logic, and once in a while pushing our thinking way out beyond where we had dared to go). While we value that kind of feedback, we're also curious about many readers follow the links to the full articles and actually read them.

Thus, we periodically check with our email service provider and our web hosting service to try to identify which articles are read the most frequently or downloaded. And while we know it's not really scientific, we do see the frequency counts as an important form of feedback.

All that is a way of introducing our "Top Ten" most-read articles from 2009 (not all of them written by us, of course; we're privileged to have a number of guest authors who generously share their ideas and experiences with us and you).

Here you go:

• 10. (tie) "Taking Charge of Tomorrow" (January)
• 10. (tie) "Scotty, Take it Up to Warp Factor 5.6!" (June)
• 8. "Older Workers and the Job Market" (by Dr. William Arnold, November)
• 7. "Someone Hit the Reset Button" (May)
• 6. "The Dismal Science Dives into a Dismal Swamp" (October)
• 5. "Finding Your Right Work" (James Horan, March)
• 4. "Will the Office of the Future Need Furniture?" (Mike Dunlap, May)
• 3. "Our 2009 Strategy" (February)
• 2. "Concentrating on Concentration" (February")

and the number one article from 2009 was:

• "Is this a Nice Place to Live, or What?" (July/August)

We see two broad themes in this list. First, you are very interested in the economics of the future (duh!)—several of these articles dealt with the 2009 economic crisis, and how organizations can find their way out of it. And, second, you are interested in personal effectiveness and what you can do individually to survive. No real surprises, but a useful insight.

If you missed any of these the first time around, we hope you'll squeeze out a few minutes to go back and check them out. We think they are still very timely.

Finally, if you want to browse through all of our 2009 articles (and 2008 as well), feel free to visit our Newsletter Archive, always online at this link:

http://www.thefutureofwork.net/news_newsletter_archive.html

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