Headphones are the new wall.
Productivity is for machines. If you can measure it, robots should do it.
(Source: stoweboyd.com)
There is more to be gained by producing more opportunities than by optimizing existing ones.
Productivity, however, is exactly the wrong thing to care about in the new economy.
The problem with trying to measure productivity is that it measures only how well people can do the wrong jobs. Any job that can be measured for productivity probably should be eliminated from the list of jobs that people do.
In the coming era, doing the exactly right next thing is far more fruitful than doing the same thing twice.
If you happen to be in London or New York, and looking for a good place to settle down and work for a while, this Web app should help you do just that.
Let’s Meet and Work is the brainchild of Alasdair Monk, a user interface designer and app developer.
(via Let’s meet and work: Places to work in London & New York - TNW Apps)
'Cyberloafing' At Work Boosts Productivity, Researchers Find
Bosses may have it all wrong when they assume that funny cat videos and FAIL slideshows are a drain on the workplace. Some new research finds that a moderate amount of mindless web surfing actually makes workers more productive at their jobs.
And the more mindless the surfing, the better.
“Employees who browse the web more end up being more engaged at work, so why fight that if it’s in moderation?” says Don J.Q. Chen, a researcher at the National University of Singapore and a co-author of the new report, presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management.
» via The Huffington Post
The 5 Most Pretentious Productivity Buzzwords - Mike Vardy
I guess I am getting used to seeing my name in other people’s posts on topics I’m interested in, but in this case I think Mike Vardy got what I said backwards, in a piece about productivity buzzwords:
Mike Vardy via The Next Web
5. Flow
Actual Definition: To proceed smoothly and readily.
Virtual Definition: A way to say that you can’t be interrupted or progress will grind to a halt.
I’ll be the first to admit that when I’m writing, I’m in a state of flow. And I hate to be interrupted when I’m in that state. But the prevalence of the term on the Web has created the notion that once flow is broken, then it’s okay that progress stops. And since flow comes at any given time and without warning, then all you can do is wait for it. Not true. Some things require full attention and a state of flow is perhaps the “fullest” of attention one can offer, and some don’t. When I come out of flow, I can work on emails, reading and things that can be done and can be afforded interruption.
“The small shift of consciousness that comes from remaining in the flow setting — messages and posts flitting by, dozens of chats, firing off quick updates to your circles of contacts — seems like the devil to the advocates of industrial age thinking and practices.” – Stowe Boyd
So while not everyone appreciates flow, it is a powerful tool — as long as its power is being used for good (getting the best out of a person) and not for evil (getting hardly anything out of a person).
I think Vardy’s definition of flow is too restrictive, making the case that flow equates to concentrating on a single thing. However, flow means being in a zone where everything seems to be working together, and there is time for decisions to be made, actions to be taken. Think about the players on a basketball team, playing at their peak: they see the floor, the other players, and move effortlessly to where the ball is going to be. They aren’t distracted when a team mate calls to them: it’s all part of the flow.
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi characterizes flow as energized focus, being completely immersed in an activity. But the boundaries of what is part of the activity — and what is outside of it — is as flexible as the range of human endeavor. It is not limited to a single unitary task of short duration.
But for many, flow has become synonymous with a exclusionary focus on a single activity, but I don’t use it that way.
Enter the Dragon: The Old Man Schedule
I’m doing it. No more playing around. I’m manning up. I’m doing the old man schedule.
—Matthew Smith, SquaredeyeOver the last few months I have attempted—unsuccessfully—to switch to a much earlier schedule built around highly productive early mornings, getting the most out of time with my family, and cutting out all of the late nights. I always feel like I accomplish significantly more on the old man schedule, but I need to learn the ability to fight the urge to stay up late just to get “one more thing done”.
I am always on the ‘old man schedule’ — the mornings are my most productive time, and they get ruined by late nights.
After buying data on more than 23,000 publicly traded companies, Bettencourt and West discovered that corporate productivity, unlike urban productivity, was entirely sublinear. As the number of employees grows, the amount of profit per employee shrinks. West gets giddy when he shows me the linear regression charts. “Look at this bloody plot,” he says. “It’s ridiculous how well the points line up.” The graph reflects the bleak reality of corporate growth, in which efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy. “When a company starts out, it’s all about the new idea,” West says. “And then, if the company gets lucky, the idea takes off. Everybody is happy and rich. But then management starts worrying about the bottom line, and so all these people are hired to keep track of the paper clips. This is the beginning of the end.”
The danger, West says, is that the inevitable decline in profit per employee makes large companies increasingly vulnerable to market volatility. Since the company now has to support an expensive staff — overhead costs increase with size — even a minor disturbance can lead to significant losses. As West puts it, “Companies are killed by their need to keep on getting bigger.”
For West, the impermanence of the corporation illuminates the real strength of the metropolis. Unlike companies, which are managed in a top-down fashion by a team of highly paid executives, cities are unruly places, largely immune to the desires of politicians and planners. “Think about how powerless a mayor is,” West says. “They can’t tell people where to live or what to do or who to talk to. Cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant. They’re just these insane masses of people, bumping into each other and maybe sharing an idea or two. It’s the freedom of the city that keeps it alive.”
- Jonah Lehrer, A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation
Consider this idea: the most successful companies of the future will be those that operate more like cities. ‘More of a village than an army’, as I wrote in Defining Social Business:
Metaphorically, a social business will seem more like a village than an army, and where a lot of 20th management approaches will be obsolete. We can expect these features:
- ubiquitous use of social tools, and social networks,
- greater levels of personal autonomy,
- self-organization of groups and projects,
- very porous boundaries with the world,
- high reliance on non-financial motivation, or personal meaning and purpose,
- internal marketplaces for ideas and talent,
- and senior management operating more like Hollywood producers or investors than autocrats.
Or perhaps a CEO operating like a mayor? Would senior management actively create a context in which their control was limited and much of the company’s activities were not directed by top-down commands?
As Gibson said, ‘The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.’ Many companies have some of these characteristics, but very few have all of them.
I will be pursuing these ideas, and topics related to them, in my Future of Work research initiative this year. Stay tuned for a manifesto in the early new year.
Surrender To The Stream, And Be Happy
Streaming apps — based on the open follower model, or variants of it — will be the dominant motif of the web for the foreseeable future. And this is having an impact on everything that touches it, including our sense of time.
A great deal of research has shown that that our perception of time is quite malleable. For example, we have all experienced boredom as making the clock slow, and, an the other hand, how time seems to move more quickly during periods of happiness or excitement. Can this be exploited to make work more fun?
Robert Levin, A Geography Of Time
Psychologists and planners have sometimes used the “time flies” phenomenon to their advantage. In one project, for example, psychologist Robert Meade was able to improve workers’ morale by speeding up the psychological clock. Meade took advantage of the fact that that time is experienced as shorter when people believe that they are making progress toward a goal. The sense of progress, he found, can be enhanced through simple procedures such as establishing a definite end point to the task and providing incentives to reach those goals. Before his experiment, Meade herad comments from workers like “It sees like the day would never end” or “It seems like I’ve been here all day but it’s not even lunchtime yet.” After establishing a sense of progress there were proclamations like “The day went by so quickly — it seems like I just got started.” It is difficult to know, of course, to what extent speeding up the passage of time led to a more pleasant experience or vice versa. The direction of cause and effect, however, is less important than the net effect on workers’ well-being. Employers might be pleased to note that these increases in morale are often accompanied by accelerate production.
Management may have a hard time accepting the soft benefits of time compression and the way that tools modify our consciousness, but they will readily accept improvement in productivity and work attitudes.
One of the effects of participating in open streaming apps (like Twitter) as part of your workday, or the use streaming apps specifically designed for business use (like IBM Connections, Yammer, or the myriad other offerings) is how it shifts users’ perceptions of time, in the way that Meade research suggests.
Simply by providing a context in which users establish what they are working on, and posting notes about their progress — or asking other for help to make progress — and receiving feedback as they make progress, workers using streaming apps are likely to experience time as moving more quickly. This is either associated in our minds with other experiences that make us happy, or directly makes us happy. In either case, it seems fairly obvious that users are happier when exposed to social work contexts with these characteristics.
Management may have a hard time accepting the soft benefits of time compression and the way that tools modify our consciousness, but they will readily accept improvement in productivity and work attitudes.
Note that incentives can be amazingly minimal: just the positive regard of close contacts can be enough.
And the same holds true in our activities outside of the workplace. To be happy, it seems that we simply can share our near-term goals and our progress in reaching them with our friends and family in real time, not just stretched over weeks or months. Learning how to knit, or play the blues, or performing your next Karate kata with a groups of similarly involved others makes time pass more quickly.
There is also ample evidence to show that we learm more and make better decisions when we are engaged and happy, too. so this turns out to be a fairly virtuous cycle.
So, the next time someone suggests you are doing something childish, illegitimate or almost immoral by Twittering what you are up to, tell them about Meade’s research. And then get back to the stream.
Instant Messaging Decreases Interruptions
Those that have followed my work will know that I don’t buy the microeconomic reasoning that requests for assistance should be minimized because they lead to a decrease in personal productivity. On the contrary, I have been arguing that the willingness to trade personal productivity for connectedness is a hallmark of web culture, and that drive for connectedness trump any personal productivity hits [Boyd’s Law]. I also maintain that the productivity of the extended network of web denizens is the only sensible way to measure productivity, if it is relevant to measure it at all.
There is new evidence that suggest that the personal productivity hit may be negligible. or perhaps even a productivity boost, decreasing the overall numbers of interruptions when workers use instant messaging as a medium for interoffice communication and coordination:
[from Instant Messaging Proves Useful In Reducing Workplace Interruption]
Employers seeking to decrease interruptions may want to have their workers use instant messaging software, a new study suggests. A recent study by researchers at Ohio State University and University of California, Irvine found that workers who used instant messaging on the job reported less interruption than colleagues who did not.
The study challenges the widespread belief that instant messaging leads to an increase in disruption. Some researchers have speculated that workers would use instant messaging in addition to the phone and e-mail, leading to increased interruption and reduced productivity.
Instead, research showed that instant messaging was often used as a substitute for other, more disruptive forms of communication such as the telephone, e-mail, and face-to-face conversations. Using instant messaging led to more conversations on the computer, but the conversations were briefer, said R. Kelly Garrett, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State.
I still argue that responding to requests — whatever their source — from people that you want to remain closely connected to is a positive thing, and worth whatever the productivity hit might be, but that doesn’t mean that you should try to minimize the time consumed.
This is a strong argument that the use of presence-based social tools — not just IM — will decrease the costs inherent in interruptive communication, and increase the overall benefits from connectedness.
