Tag: productivity

Avoid Schedules

Let’s start with a bang: don’t keep a schedule. He’s crazy, you say! I’m totally serious. If you pull it off — and in many structured jobs, you simply can’t — this simple tip alone can make a huge difference in productivity. By not keeping a schedule, I mean: refuse to commit to meetings, appointments, or activities at any set time in any future day. As a result, you can always work on whatever is most important or most interesting, at any time. Want to spend all day writing a research report? Do it! Want to spend all day coding? Do it! Want to spend all day at the cafe down the street reading a book on personal productivity? Do it! When someone emails or calls to say, “Let’s meet on Tuesday at 3”, the appropriate response is: “I’m not keeping a schedule for 2007, so I can’t commit to that, but give me a call on Tuesday at 2:45 and if I’m available, I’ll meet with you.” Or, if it’s important, say, “You know what, let’s meet right now.” Clearly this only works if you can get away with it. If you have a structured job, a structured job environment, or you’re a CEO, it will be hard to pull off. But if you can do it, it’s really liberating, and will lead to far higher productivity than almost any other tactic you can try.

the secret of productivity: don’t commit to meetings.

Open Email

“JP has set up a stringent approach to filtering his email. He throws all email where he is CC’d directly into the trash. Basically, he only reads email directed to him, alone. Of course, for this to have any influence on people’s behavior, he has to loudly and regularly let others know that he is doing this. More interestingly, he has opened access to his email to his staff. By treating his email as an open forum, he has found that his associates are more involved in his interactions with others. He has found that they can use this — particularly his sent mail — is a great learning opportunity.” So much of working online involves deciding what’s public and what’s private. Rangaswami has turned this around, at least for his work (I assume he still has a private email account he doesn’t share). Although this is analogous to making email like forums and wikis, the key difference is that you are using email as the entry point. It’s not a separate wiki/forum site.

making work mail public and getting rid of the cc games would remove so much politics

AOL Powerpoint paralysis

Ever wonder precisely why big companies such as AOL are so painfully sluggish? Here’s an insight from AOL. The company engaged a top-tier naming agency, evaluated 120 different options, tested the finalists with focus groups in Denver and Chicago, checked on the meaning in 16 languages — and the brand strategy group explained its process in a laughably belabored 20-slide presentation.

heh. i bet that company in sunnyvale is pretty much the same

Don’t brag about Facebook

A Goldman Sachs trader named “Charlie” was warned by his employer that his visits to Facebook on company time were to stop. He spent over 500 hours on Facebook in a 6 month period. That works out to 4 hours per day.

Unwisely, Charlie posted the warning email on his Facebook account, saying “It’s a measure of how warped I’ve become that, not only am I surprisingly proud of this, but in addition, the first thing I did was to post it here, and that losing my job worries me far less than losing facebook ever could.”

social networks are the new unions

Waffle House cheat sheet

The photographs indicate the way in which a cook marks his orders. These secret plate markers allow a Waffle House cook to simultaneously prepare multiple customer orders at once. Let me give you an example. If I were to order 3 scrambled eggs, dry wheat toast, and hash browns, the waitress would face the grill and yell out loud – “Mark: Triple scrambled dry wheat plate.” The cook would then quickly take a large dinner plate, turn it sideways, and place a tub of jelly upside down at the 6 o’clock position. The 6 o’clock position indicates scrambled eggs, and the jelly upside down means wheat toast. I am not sure how to mark “dry” for the toast, or how to indicate hash browns versus grits.