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Productivity and Time Management

Productivity

  • How Do We Go Faster? - by John Cutler. Takeaway: Lists of concepts to apply and actions to take to build a culture that fosters a productive, efficient environment.

  • How to Say No - by various authors. Takeaway: Email/message templates for declining projects, meetings, written interviews, and other opportunities/situations.

  • How to Work Smarter, Not Harder: Myth or Efficient Strategy? - by Alexandra Cote. Takeaway: Delegate work, don’t be afraid of change coming your way, and prioritize the right way.

  • Kaleidoscope Thinking: How to Think Faster and More Clearly - by Taylor Pearson. Takeaway: use mental models from different disciplines and use them in a routine way, to build a latticework process. Read a lot, and study different models.

  • Only You Can Prevent Tech Burnout - by April Wensel. Takeaway: "The prevailing work culture in Silicon Valley is not sustainable. We all know it, but few are doing anything to change it...As leaders, whether in name or in spirit, you have a responsibility to cultivate a healthier, more sustainable culture. Why? Your team will be more productive. As shared in The Optimistic Workplace, 'People in positive work environments outperform those who work in negative climates by 10–30%.' As an employee, you owe it to yourself to improve your own situation, whether that means inspiring change at your current company or moving on to somewhere that actually does value you as a human being."

  • The Relationship between Team Emotion and Delivery - by Rafiq Gemmail. Takeaway: a summary of the research conducted by Atlassian’s Natalie Mendes and Prashant Kukde, CEO of artificial and emotional intelligence firm Deep Affects. The study used NLP to show that there's a strong relationship between emotional health and team productivity.

  • The Top 5 Productivity Mistakes - by Ramit Sethi. Takeaways: Talks about the psychology of being unproductive, and how changing the narrative can achive big breakthroughs.

  • Three Things: Reduce Fatigue and Increase Productivity - by Manel Baucells. Takeaway: A video in which Baucells, a University of Virginia/Darden professor and expert in quantitative analysis, describes research showing that managing your fatigue is key to productivity.

  • Unlock Your Productivity By Taking Better Notes - by Alex Bachuk. Takeaway: Techniques and tools for taking notes, a primary habit for maintaining self-organisation. Associate notes to bigger goals to increase influence and creativity.

  • “Vacations Are for the Weak” - by Seth Bannon. Takeaway: "Preventing burnout is part of your job. Staying well rested is part of your job. Sleep and exercise help, but occasional extended breaks are essential too, and their benefits on creativity, productivity, and happiness are well documented."

  • When Collaboration Takes a Toll on Productivity - by Kellogg Insight. Takeaway: "[I]t is not the collaboration itself that is the sole culprit. How much that collaboration interrupts another task is crucial."

  • When Teams Don’t Finish Work in a Sprint: 3 Tips to Seeing and Finishing Work - by Johanna Rothman. Takeaway: A clean, simple analysis of cumulative flow, velocity and limiting work in progress.

  • Why Team-Building Exercises Won’t Make Your Staff More Productive - by Aytekin Tank. Takeaway: Nurture teams, honor their independence, give them time and space, and be warm.

Time Management

  • Arrange Your Time and Tasks According to These Seven Categories, and You’ll Be a Creativity Machine - by David Kadavy. Takeaway: Prioritize, generate, explore, research, recharge, polish and administrate.

  • Being Busy Is Now a Status Symbol — and That Needs to Stop - by Frank Kalman. Takeaway: Mostly geared toward an American audience, the article questions the trend toward bragging about having no time and filling one's schedule—counterproductive given stress, health issues, burnout, and other negative side effects. "Yes, working hard is important. But at what point does it become unproductive to constantly seek to be the most productive?"

  • Busy to Death - by Barry O'Reilly. Takeaway: "Over-optimizing for executing work is dangerous. Actually, it’s very dangerous indeed as it causes us to get stuck in plan-do-plan-do cycles. We compromise reflection, retrospection, and review of the outcomes of all the output we are creating. We stop building learning loops into our work to plan-do-check-act the results of all this effort. We don’t allow time to study, consider, or understand if the result of all this activity is actually aligned to what we are hoping to achieve. We are frankly too busy to."

  • Daily Planning — Get Ready for the Current Day - by Jurgen Appelo. Takeaway: a five-part exercise to help you prioritize the day's work and break it down into achievable chunks.

  • Data Driven Time Management - by Noah Kagan at Sumo. Takeaway: Measure your time and then use that data to decide how you really want to be spending your time. This does not just mean office time!

  • Do You Manage Like a Gatekeeper or a Gardener? - by Jared Williams. Takeaway: Directed for new tech leads, this article discusses how to be a gatekeeper—"[who] controls the flow of information in an attempt to narrow focus and avoid surprises" (otherwise known as a "shit shield")—and a gardener who "trusts, encourages autonomy, and exposes their team to higher level problems."

  • Does Your Solution Solve the Right Problem? - by Brian. Takeaway: "[B]efore breaking ground on any project, write down the problem you’re trying to solve and why you’re solving it. Get that reviewed before you make any decisions or write any code. And make sure you do it every time before you start building a new piece of software. Do this, and you’ll avoid the many pitfalls that can keep an engineer from solving the right problem." Why we solve the wrong problems: technology-driven development, premature frameworks, sunk cost roadmaps.

  • EMAIL TEMPLATE: Help a Programmer Stay Focused, Please - by Oren Ellenbogen. Takeaway: "It’s your responsibility to handle incoming requests from humans, to say 'no' or at least 'later' when appropriate. Humans learn, they just need feedback." Includes a template to send people when distractions/disruptions become unmanageable/affect productivity.

  • Evidence Based Scheduling - by Joel Spolsky. Takeaway: "You gather evidence, mostly from historical timesheet data, that you feed back into your schedules. What you get is not just one ship date: you get a confidence distribution curve, showing the probability that you will ship on any given date...The steeper the curve, the more confident you are that the ship date is real."

  • Focus – Keynote at AgileByExample, Warsaw and summary - by Henrik Kniberg. Takeaway: Focus on extracting more value from your available time. “Busy-ness” is an artificial concept. Build slack into your schedule to achieve better focus.

  • From Inbox-Zero to Todo-List-Zero - by Joe Goldberg. Takeaway: "Todo List Zero: Stuff on your to-do list that needs more than a moment to resolve should get onto your calendar. Block out time in advance for [this], at the time of day where you get your best work done (figure this out if you don’t already know). Also block out time for self-initiated tasks: time to do nothing but think, time to learn and read, etc."

  • Gatekeepers and Gardeners - by Jared Williams. Takeaway: "To manage, new leaders often adopt the role of a gatekeeper early on and have a hard time letting go...A gatekeeper controls the flow of information in an attempt to narrow focus and avoid surprises." Be a gardener instead. "A gardener trusts, encourages autonomy, and exposes their team to higher level problems. Gardeners turn scaling and growth into a team sport."

  • Getting Started with Getting Things Done - by JB Rainsberger. Takeaway: the core of David Allen's Getting Things Done system, condensed into a four-page document.

  • The Habit of No - by Ethan Austin. The habit of saying no is important for teamwork and keeping a startup focused on the common goal.

  • Hack Back Distractions with Tactics from This Behavioral Designer - by FirstRound. Takeaway: Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable: How to Master the Skill of the Century and other books, on how to redefine and beat distractions.

  • How Much to Manage (“Management Energy Units”) - by Steven Sinofsky. Takeaway: Discusses the various level-directions of management (down to reports, up to your boss, sideways to your peers), as well as how much time an individual level should generally be spending on them vs "work". Make sure you are spending the right amount of time managing in the right areas.

  • It's Time to Stop Wearing Burnout as a Badge of Courage - by Stephanie Jade Wong. Takeaway: Predict your burnout using the Overwhelm Cycle, a diagram of a clock that highlights what happens at 11:30 PM for you to hit burnout mode. Then work your way backward. Get a support network, plan breaks and list priorities.

  • Manage Your Day-to-Day - by Seth Godin, Dan Ariely, Gretchen Rubin, Erin Rooney Doland, and other contributors. The book shows you how to stop letting other people run your schedule; find the right recharge/productivity balance; optimize digital communications/social media use, and more.

  • The Management Technique Essential to Google’s Growth - by Blake Thorne. Takeaway: On the potential benefits of open office hours and how to make them work.

  • Manager Energy Drain - by Lara Hogan. Takeaway: Three tricks to conserve your energy — defragging your calendar, delegating messy and unscoped projects and saying no.

  • My New Calendar System - by Phin Barnes. Takeaway: Ensure your time spent in meetings aligns with your priorities, and that you're not so busy that you can't be productive. Don't overcommit. And check to see if this describes you: "...I found that I was most frequently canceling or re-scheduling on my strongest and most valuable connections because I believed they’d be most likely to understand."

  • No Time to Be Nice at Work - by Christine Porath. Takeaway: "Rudeness and bad behavior have all grown over the last decades, particularly at work. For nearly 20 years [Porath has] been studying, consulting and collaborating with organizations around the world to learn more about the costs of this incivility. How we treat one another at work matters. Insensitive interactions have a way of whittling away at people’s health, performance and souls."

  • No "Yes." Either "HELL YEAH!" or "No" - by Derek Sivers. Takeaways: If you are overcommitted, recalibrate when you say yes. Saying "no" more gives you more time to say "HELL YEAH!" for things that are really important to you.

  • On Becoming Me-Shaped Again - by Katherine Daniels of Travis CI. Takeaway: "It’s unfortunate that it took me getting to the point where I nearly completely broke before I realized how burnt out and unbalanced I actually was. But it’s a good reminder to me to pay closer attention to how I’m spending my time and how I’m defining myself."

  • One-Touch to Inbox Zero - by Tiago Forte. Takeaway: five relatively simple steps for implementing Inbox Zero.

  • Reducing Hours by Focusing your Job - by Natalie Nagele. Takeaway: How to use a mindmap plus the 30-60-90 plan to clarify the focus of your role, plus what to prioritize. Can be a great exercise to do with your team.

  • Research: When Managers Are Overworked, They Treat Employees Less Fairly - by Elad N. Sherf, Ravi S. Gajendran and Vijaya Venkataramani. Takeaway: Some managers are "too busy" to be fair. "Over 60 years of research finds that fairness is not one simple, singular choice but a complex and integrated set of decisions and actions. To be judged as fair by employees, bosses have to attend to four aspects of fairness: First, they have to ensure distributive fairness by making sure that employees are equitably rewarded for their contributions. Second, they have to follow transparent and clear procedures in arriving at those rewards. These include ensuring decisions are consistently applied across people and situations and are based on accurate information, suppressing bias in the decision process, and providing opportunities for employees to voice concerns. Third, they have to engage in informational fairness by explaining the logic behind their decisions in a timely manner. Last but not the least, they have to be interpersonally fair by treating employees with dignity and respect."

  • Three P’s of Prioritizing - by the John Maxwell Company. Takeaway: If you are feeling crunched for time, reevaluate your priorites. The three Ps are Private Time, Production Time, and People Time.

  • Thinking Is Work. Give Yourself Time to Do It. - by Chris Savage. Takeaway: "It is easy to feel guilty if you find yourself with the time to think. We have a tech culture that reveres the hustle. Crazy work hours and paying your dues are the norm. The challenge is that, when scaling, that thinking time becomes even more important, and much harder to get." Delegate to find time to think.

  • The Value of Flow (deck - by Dan North. Takeaway: "Resource efficiency is about keeping people busy," which leads to context-switching and reduces focus. Pull systems more naturally create efficient workflows; limit the work in progress, to enhance focus.

  • What You Don't Know About Management - How to Take Back Your Workday - by Janet Choi and Walter Chen at iDoneThis. A longer read that starts with self-managing your own success and covers how to manage people more effectively, as well as effective meeting tips.

  • Why Work Doesn't Happen at Work - by Jason Fried @ TedXMidwest. Takeaways: Interruptions are toxic, and make workers have to restart. Work to reduce syncronous communication in order to free up employees to have more uninterrupted productive time.