Maybe waterboarding as punishment for crappy, long presentations?

Working late in the night or very early in the morning, or with people on the other side of the world helps me to avoid the current daily buzz/noise via IM/Email/Feeds/Phone… You can easily filter the entire past day to make a good summary and you can also keep some hours of shared time.

With a big afternoon nap to survive, it works great.

But it’s freelancer only I imagine.

I saw this idea years ago in Robert Townsend’s rather excellent book Further Up the Organization. His idea was actually to keep meetings short by not providing any seating. I’d venture to guess that no time gets wasted in a meeting like that.

I wholeheartedly embrace protecting my time and attention even if it means pissing some people off. The problem with this is that I am looking for an internship right now and after that, a full time gig with good pay and benefits. My fear is that these time wasting masturbation substitutes are so ingrained in the culture of many organizations that I might be seen as antisocial or not a team player or some other pejorative term. How do you deal with that? Having to explain to someone that you didn’t get their cute email yet (and might never depending on the gates in place) or won’t watch that YouTube video or forward the warm fuzzies on to 50 other innocent bastards even if your nuts turn black and fall off because of your vigilant protection of your time and attention is likely to waste just as much time as dealing with the other bullshit.

So, all that ranting aside, how can we get others to play nice with systems that aren’t psychotic? (I have worked in the mental health field so please don’t go Dr. Phil “You can’t control other people…” on me.) Is it operant conditioning? Booby trap the cubicle entrance? Wet noodle lashings? Autoresponders? These could quickly cruft up others’ inboxes.

I implement these kinds of principles in my personal life and my business, but I am really having a hard time (and a sense of despair actually) about trying to maintain these principles in a corporate environment.

Ah good article… In my college design studio classes, many times to keep prodcutive we are told or suggested to do a few things. First, music. Either you have your ipod in or you listen to complete silence. Some professors want silence, some let you listen to music. But for the most part, lots of discussion is frowned upon. They don’t mind exchanging words, but frankly its hard to concentrate or reach creatively when you are conversing. Also, all laptops and phones are off..and if doing digital art, wireless is off. Its importanat to not interrupt the mind-state of the artist…

Again though this is from the college art studio. Productivity is really dependent on how creative you are and how willing you are to keep that hand moving. Some people to focus will do a few pages of just gestures, lines, and ellipses. Many consider this “getting into the Right Brain” A good way to think of it is like a runner moving into stride. Eventually if you have a good group of artists, you all move into the right brain and productivity takes off.

One of the biggest productivity killers in my day-to-day work is people coming to my office or calling me to ask me one-off questions.

I’ve instituted office hours; certain times during the day (mainly in the hour after lunch) I’m willing to allow myself to be interrupted. From 1-2 PM is unfocused time - any other time, I have the phone set to roll over to voicemail and if I do answer the door, it’s to ask people to come back later.

If I need super-protected time at work, I go in on Saturday afternoons. Our postdoc will be here, but it's not him I'm avoiding, it's the boss and his research scientist. Because even when you're in the middle of a time-critical experiment, it's their immediate needs that I have to give my time and attention to - else I'm on the boss's ****-list for weeks and weeks for not doing my job. Even if I'm doing my job. Research is petty.

He's usually not here on a Saturday afternoon, and she never is, which means I can focus without the constant interruption.

We did this for one project where we had daily “standing” meetings. Basically the idea is that everyone stands and the meetings are only long enough to get a status update, short discussions and some to-do’s. Other topics are discussed more in-depth during the normal weekly status meetings. These standing meetings are just to ensure we don’t have any road blocks that will lose 2 or 3 days of productivity. They also generally only involve the people actually doing the work and not as much management.

For me, I get more work donewhen I telecommute or work on another OS (such as Unix/Linux instead of Windows). This helps keep me from being distracted by emails or the phone calls. Thank goodness for source control and ftp.

I have a simple Rule in Mail.app that moves all incoming mail without my e-mail address explicitly in “To” into a “Bulk Mail” folder for later processing.

This 10-second trick saves me hours of stress later because I instantly know what is directed to me, and what is not. It saves me from having to read a message, then figure out that it’s not really just for me by having to look at headers.

I found it easier when I was constantly being tagged with things and walk-up traffic, that I had to move to a free cube somewhere else in the building or in another building across the parking lot, to get things done. I’d only inform my manager and team members that mattered, and get away. I was still in full contact if needed, still around if needed, but I could evade more easily.

I’m the purchasing manager for a small contract electronics manufacture. When we started to grow a few years ago the owners decided we needed a new VP to run the company, They ended up promoting one of our managers to the position. Now I’m no fan of meetings but sometimes it helps to get everybody on the same path which we definitely weren’t. So being a small shop I suggested privately to the new VP that we needed at minimum a weekly meeting to get everyone on track. The first meeting ran for 4 hours! When the second ran 4 hours it hit me, the new VP wasn’t running the meeting. We were just a room full of managers running on for hours. Again, I had a talk with the VP and urged that an agenda be created and stuck to for the meeting. The next meeting with an agenda ran only an hour and half!

I ran a meeting a couple of months ago that involved people from both inside and outside my company. I instituted a strict “no cell phone” rule for the meeting. Here’s the e-mail I sent to the participants beforehand:

“Just a forewarning. Wednesday’s meeting will be cell phone free. Everyone needs to TURN OFF their cell phone. I don’t mean put it on vibrate. I mean TURN IT OFF. I rank a ringing or vibrating cell phone while you’re in a meeting, having a meal with someone, or talking face-to-face with some one in any other way on the rudeness scale right around smoking, picking your nose, scratching your butt, or farting in public. Mankind survived for thousands of years without cell phones; you can survive for a couple of hours. :) Thank you!”

There were some grumbles, but everyone got the point. :) Afterward everyone commented on how productive the meeting was and how much we got done in 3 hours, and they all attributed it to the “cell phone free zone”.

From now on, any meetings I run will be cell-phone free.

Can’t pull it off when my boss is running meetings, though, as he’s a Crackberry addict. :(

My boss actually does the Mr. Hand routine to sales associates when he gives sales training sessions. It only takes one or two of these in recent memory to ensure that the entire sales force is on-time.

I attend a stand up meeting each day. The problem with stand up meetings is that it is very difficult to take notes while standing. My personal pet peeves include folks not taking noted to remind them of next actions that come as a result of the meetings. If no actions came out of the meeting, why hold it in the first place.

I guess in my case, standing up does not really make this particular the meeting any more useful.