productivity

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one. — Mark Twain

Sharing more widely something that came up in a sketching session — a simple mnemonic for coming up with small / recurrent actions and avoid ending with generic goals that aren’t actionable: Tip Ask “how?” repeatedly until it it becomes silly 🙂 For example, if the initial thing I come up with is… Understand better the inner working of this particular thing Asking “how?” makes it clear that something is missing; so it becomes…...

The JOT Method Here’s how it works: Take a pen or pencil and turn to a blank page of a notebook. Write today’s date in the upper left-hand corner. Think of one simple task that you’ve been putting off. Write it down underneath the date. Do that task and only that task. Don’t write out a to-do list. It’s easy to let yourself get distracted by all of the other undone tasks you aren’t doing....

The State of Engineering Productivity in 2024 📊 1) Hybrid is hard Teams who work in hybrid mode have the hardest time. It is tough to create an environment where the playing field is level for everybody: there is less incentive to build a truly remote-friendly environment than in full-remote teams, while at the same time you don’t get the full benefits of co-location. Committing decisively to one of the two extremes might bring better results in terms of productivity — but of course it can be more challenging in other departments....

BICEPS — PALOMA MEDINA There are six core needs researchers find are important for humans (both at work and in our personal lives). Each of us have a personal hierarchy for the six however: … Getting to know them is a shortcut to better communication, as well as greater inclusivity at work. Belonging Improvement Choice Equality/ Fairness Predictability Significance See also: Coaching Questions Cheat Sheet - Google Docs Getting to Know Others’ BICEPS Core Needs

Hate OKRs? Avoid these 7 mistakes | by Sarah Goff-Dupont | Smells Like Team Spirit | Medium Mistake #1: confusing themes with objectives Mistake #2: capturing all your work as OKRs Mistake #3: confusing key results with tasks Mistake #4: scoring key results by gut-feel Mistake #5: scoring key results on the wrong scale Mistake #6: consistently scoring 1s on every OKR Mistake #7: doggedly pursuing a bogus OKR After a few quarters of doing OKRs the way they’re supposed to be done (or close to it), I generally feel more focused....

Energy makes time | everything changes Even the most progressive and thoughtful organizations regularly cultivate situations where the amount of work outstrips the capacity of the people in place to do it. There are tactics, of course, and by the time people have come to me, they’ve usually tried them all. … It hasn’t worked. What differentiates these experiences isn’t the number of hours in the day but the energy we get from the work....

Cheat Sheet Finder | finders This page provides links to and short descriptions of content that provides succinct guidance on many different topics, which fall under domains such as Agile software development, and working in teams. The Cheat Sheet Finder includes the following categories: Flow/Getting Stuff Done Psychological Safety Kanban, eXtreme Programming (XP), Scrum Software Development

Dr. Nicole Forsgren is a developer productivity and DevOps expert who works with engineering organizations to make work better. Best known as co-author of the Shingo Publication Award-winning book Accelerate and the DevOps Handbook, 2nd edition and author of the State of DevOps Reports, she has helped some of the biggest companies in the world transform their culture, processes, tech, and architecture. In today’s podcast, we discuss: Two frameworks for measuring developer productivity: DORA and SPACE Benchmarks for what good and great look like Common mistakes to avoid when measuring developer productivity Resources and tools for improving your metrics Signs your developer experience needs attention How to improve your developer experience Nicole’s Four-Box framework for thinking about data and relationships Chapters...

The goal is to apply “inbox zero” concepts to Slack and mitigate the pressures to “respond immediately”. The realisation is that sections can become a pseudo-inbox of channels that need reading (as opposed to considering messages the unit to manipulate).