Productivity

Productivity

When your team at work isn’t working as a team

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I saw something like this at the BBC a couple of times:

If your team deals with important issues and team members have strong views on those issues, you can end up in a deadlock. When that happens, people dig into their own preferred solutions, operating from a unilateral control mindset where everyone believes that he or she understands the situation and is right, and that those who disagree just don’t understand the situation and are wrong. When all team members are thinking and acting this way, it creates a vicious reinforcing cycle. The more people try to prevail, the more people stand their ground, and the less likely it is that the team will ultimately resolve anything.

How to Break Through Deadlock on Your Team – Roger Schwarz, Harvard Business Review (7 July 2015)

I admit I read that and thought oh, bless. It assumes everyone on the team wants the best for the group, that the only difference is in how they think it should be done. In this positive kind of world there are no people out for themselves, nobody who sees this job as a temporary stepping stone to a better one if they come out looking good.

So I’m not recommending you follow every piece of advice in this boy scout kind of article but this is Harvard Business Review, they ought to know what they’re doing, so I am saying you should read the full piece.

The short answer is that talking to everyone and learning what brings them to their conclusions can help. It can, it’s true. Firing a few people focuses the mind too.

Did they really call it Microsoft Tossup?

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It just sounds like the punchline to some joke. But Tossup is real and if you give a toss what it’s about, it’s for getting together with all your friends for lunch because it saves all that tedious chatting and enjoying time with those pals while you work out where to go. Be more efficient with your socialising! Give a Tossup!

Minimum Necessary Change

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I’m not going to quote you anything here because I got this idea from a book that has no quotable excerpts from. Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity is brilliant when you’re a teenager, substantially less so when you’re not. It’s a novel with eye-poppingly great ideas, it just makes you close your eyes wincing at how poorly it’s written. Asimov was a permanent schoolboy, that’s all. Yet there is an idea that sticks with me.

It’s called the Minimum Necessary Change and in his millennia-spanning time-travel tale, it means this. The most gigantic event can be traced back to the very tiniest of things. I think an example he gives is of a war being prevented because a tea cup is moved. In the book’s world, this cup or whatever it is being moved to a different shelf means it’s not where some fella expects it to be and it takes him a minute to find it. That delay means he leaves the house a minute later than he would have done and so he gets caught up in traffic or something, he’s late getting to a big meeting, he doesn’t annoy someone who therefore doesn’t start a war.

Okay, I may have skipped on a few steps there but you got the idea and you saw where it’s going.

It’s in my mind because I read a thing this morning, a factual article rather than a naff novel, recommending what it said was the Minimum Effective Dose. You can read that here but the piece says that’s a medical term to do with finding the very least medicine dose you can give someone before it works. With the idea that giving them more than that is a waste and/or dangerous. The article takes that idea and applies it to productivity and says that you should look for the least you can do to get what you want.

And I don’t like that.

I’m not sure why since it makes sense and any effort you don’t apply to this job you can apply to another. Yet somehow I read that and I take away an idea of not trying. Of pushing papers around, of getting by. I want to do things that matter to me more than that.

And as I pondered away about this MED thing, Asimov’s MNC popped into my head from a couple of decades ago. His is a time travel thing and works by seeing this great big war and tracking back to the smallest possible origin, finding the point where with the least twiddling you can get the result you want. I just prefer that.

The reason for the Minimum Necessary Change is not laziness or the conservation of energy, it’s that you could accidentally set off a different war if you do the wrong thing. That’s it, I’ve got it now: both Asimov’s MNR and this article’s Minimum Effective Dose are about getting the most by doing the least, but MED is apathetic and MNR is precise. Minimum Necessary Change says you do this and exactly this to get that. MED says you do enough to get what you want.

I don’t know how doctors calculate the MED, though presumably there’s a lot of research data to call on. I also don’t quite know how you can time travel back to a point where moving a tea mug will save the world.

But I really like the idea that the smallest thing you do right now can make massive changes in your life later. Plus, I’m going to tidy my shelves, so there’s that too.

Being smart about stupid productivity killers

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In fairness, you could probably call reading this a productivity killer but I like having you here. Let me make it worth your while with this piece from Oskar on Growthzer.com that sets out four things you do that you could change and feel better about.

One of them is a reasonably involved idea about your To Do list and I’m less taken with that but the others are so simple as to be hard to disagree with. Here’s Number 1: today your desk.

My personal rule for keeping a clear desk says: keep as less as possible on your desk. At the moment when I’m writing this, there’s nothing on my desk except a keyboard, mouse and screen. But I used to have a really chaotic workplace. Books, notes, office accessories and souvenirs. And a cork board above the desk with countless sticky notes. Generally, a lot of distracting stuff which hindered concentration.

Now with hindsight, I wonder how I even wanted to work surrounded by so much equipment. It became obvious that a clear desk is a starting point for having more control over your productivity.

4 Stupid Productivity Killers You Should Be Aware Of – Oskar, Growthzer.com (8 April 2015)

Read the full piece.

Talk to your team when you can’t talk to your team

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I’ve been working with a firm who has the problem that its very many staff all work different patterns so it’s difficult just knowing who is in today and who you don’t have to worry about why they’re late. Many can and some do work from home, too, so keeping track of everyone is tough and scheduling company-wide meetings is murder.

Don’t tell them, but when I go back in next week, I’m going to recommend they use a certain type of technology to help. In fact, I was going to recommend Slack for certain until I read the Huffington Post’s research into all apps that can help large teams function together. I still almost certainly will recommend it as the HuffPost is certainly praising of it too:

Slack claims to be changing the way teams communicate, and looking at testimonials, it appears to do just that. The desktop and mobile allows teams to chat in channels with conversations divided by subjects, and you can chat and share photos, videos and music. So it’s a bit like having an ongoing meeting which you can dip in and out of. Slack is free to download, with Standard, Plus and Enterprise ($49-99/month) options with enhanced features, like Google apps integration and usage stats.

7 Workplace Chat Apps to Keep Your Team in Sync – Jack Flanagan, Huffington Post (28 March 2015)

Read the full piece to see what all of these apps do and just what they are. And then take a look at Slack. Also, take a look at this video from the Slack company:

The morning routines of writers

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There’s a website called My Morning Routine and it collects people’s accounts of how they start their typical working days. For some reason I can’t quite put my finger on yet tickles me, the site includes more writers than any other profession. Maybe everyone else is getting on with their day instead of writing about it.

But I took a stroll through the collection and found this pull quote from writer Amber Rae. I’ve not heard of her before and I was drawn to her section only by the description that she is a ‘fire starter’. I’m glad I looked now because her account is headed by this, which I do very much recognise:

For many years, my morning routine was a result of how other people expected me to show up. I was overwhelmed and off-center because I was ignoring the messages my body was sending me.
My Morning Routine – Amber Rae, My Morning Routine (25 March 2015)

Read the full piece of hers plus, currently 58 other writers and more ordinary people.

Don’t ever say or think ‘that’s good enough’

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Brian Grazer, producer of 24 and Arrested Development on how there are no rules to how you achieve success – except maybe on.

“Every once in a while I rationalize quality,” [Brian Grazer] continued. “There are so many decision you make, and you’re trying to do excellence. We know what excellence is. We know what better food is versus not good food. But there’s a rationalizing process—that’s good enough. Anytime the light bulb goes, that’s good enough, it’s shitty!”

Brian Grazer Talks ’24,’ ‘Arrested Development,’ and Regretting ‘Cowboys & Aliens’ at Aspen – Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic (4 July 2015)

Read the full piece.

Getting just a wee bit too close to technology

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Hand on heart, I don’t give a damn about technology. If you know me above a minute, you think I do because I’m dripping with Apple gear and I talk a lot about how great certain software tools are for my work. But if you are technology-minded and you know me above 90 seconds, you know I’m not in your league and I know nothing.

Specifically, I know nothing about gigahertz and processor speeds and for one example, I can’t follow why one Android phone is better than an iPhone because its processor runs at twice the clock speed yet when I hold them in my hand, the Android is slow as a dog and I’ve already finished what I’m working on with the iPhone.

That’s really my interest: the work. I could not have the career I do without all these tools and when something is that useful to you, when something has directly and measurably changed your working and your actual life, it’s hard not to get attached to it.

I freely admit I may have gone too far. But late last month my iMac got recalled by Apple because of some potential fault. They took it in, they fixed it, they returned it and they did all that for free – but it still meant I was without my frankly beloved iMac for about a week.

I did get two articles out of the experience, though, and actually I really like both of them. Consider this a weekend read and do have a laugh at how broken hearted I got. Here’s Living Without the iMac part 1 and Living without the iMac part 2 – it’s back over on MacNN.com.

“Getting Things Done” in 500 words

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Davide Magrin, a blogger, has much the same opinion I do of Getting Things Done by David Allen, specifically:

Getting Things Done by David Allen is a book that I found tedious, excessively long and filled with corporate buzzwords. Fortunately, it also contains extremely interesting and actionable ideas for personal organization and productivity. Even when isolated from the context, these principles apply very well and can be useful in everyday life.

Getting Things Done in 500 words or less – David Magrin (2 July 2015)

But Magrin has gone further than I have and summarised the book, saying:

I believe that if you get a sense of the main ideas of the book and experiment with them on your own a little bit, you can get the same results you would reach reading the whole book. The only differences would be in your life duration (5 hours longer) and in your wallet’s weight (15 bucks heavier).

I don’t mind the bucks as it’s worth it to me to spend a little cash on these things plus of course Allen should be rewarded for the good bits of his works. I do mind the time, though I seemingly read faster than Magrin.

Still, he has got the book down to 500 words – actually, 389. Read the full piece.