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 ...

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. Just do the one thing you wrote down. Once it’s done, draw a thin line through the task so that you can still read it, but you know it’s complete. Repeat steps 3-5. The goal of J.O.T. isn’t to get more stuff done. Or even to get more of the “right” stuff done. Instead, the aim is to break the procrastination-paralysis loop right now by proving to yourself that you are, in fact, capable of following through and taking action. ...

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. It’s easy to figure out what I should be working on at any given point in the quarter. And if someone requests additional work from me, I can weigh it against OKR-related work and give them a yes/no answer quickly. ...

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. Energy makes time. ...

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. ...

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).

How long is the ideal vacation? Researchers weigh in | Business News | nola.com It takes a few days to truly unwind and start to forget about the work … Vacationers seemed to reach that point after about a week away, … … vacation afterglow only lasts for about a week after returning to work, regardless of the length of time spent away. To get the most out of your time off, researchers suggest taking multiple vacations spaced throughout the work year, with getaways ideally lasting between seven and 11 days. ...

(via The Apollo Planner – The Planner ) Introducing the Apollo Planner, a beautifully simple daily planner that delivers powerful productivity and real results.

Immediately after every lecture, meeting, or any significant experience, take 30 seconds — no more, no less — to write down the most important points. Sonra Oku (via The 30 second habit with a lifelong impact — Medium )

Inspiration is perishable… Inspiration is like fresh fruit or milk: It has an expiration date. Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson (via REWORK: The new business book from 37signals. ) If you want to do something, you’ve got to do it now. You can’t put it on a shelf and wait two months to get around to it. You can’t just say you’ll do it later. Later, you won’t be pumped up about it anymore. ...

Coffitivity – Increase Your Creativity! Our team has delivered the vibe of a coffee shop right to your desktop, which means when your workspace just isn’t quite cutting it, we’ve got you covered. Coffitivity — Enough noise to work.

How long can you work on making a routine task more efficient before you’re spending more time than you save? (across 5 years) (via xkcd: Is It Worth the Time? )

The instinct to produce great work doesn’t require a fancy notebook. Seth Godin (via Seth’s Blog: A productivity gap )

If we want to see women pay more equal to men, what we need to do is convince more women to go into areas such as the sciences, and the mathematics and engineering, and we need to convince men to take more responsibility for children in the house. When those begin to even out, we’ll see wages begin to even out as well. See also Thomas Sowell address these exact same concerns back in the 70s

A programmer takes between 10-15 minutes to start editing code after resuming work from an interruption. When interrupted during an edit of a method, only 10% of times did a programmer resume work in less than a minute. A programmer is likely to get just one uninterrupted 2-hour session in a day (via Programmer Interrupted )

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey (1932-2012) Be proactive Begin with the end in mind Put first things first Think win-win Seek first to understand and the to be understood Synergize Sharpen the saw … and the eighth habit is to: Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs Old, but timeless!