Managers, take note:

Employees are vastly more satisfied and productive, it turns out, when four of their core needs are met: physical, through opportunities to regularly renew and recharge at work; emotional, by feeling valued and appreciated for their contributions; mental, when they have the opportunity to focus in an absorbed way on their most important tasks and define when and where they get their work done; and spiritual, by doing more of what they do best and enjoy most, and by feeling connected to a higher purpose at work.

This isn’t rocket science, but an important reminder. It’s similar to Jocelyn Glei’s conclusion in What Motivates Us To Do Great Work?:

For creative thinkers, [author Daniel] Pink identifies three key motivators: autonomy (self-directed work), mastery (getting better at stuff), and purpose (serving a greater vision). All three are intrinsic motivators. Even a purpose, which can seem like an external motivator, will be internalized if you truly believe in it. […]

As creative thinkers, we want to make progress, and we want to move big ideas forward. So, it’s no surprise that the best motivator is being empowered to take action.

The post I wrote this weekend on software development belief systems in corporate environments has been in my head for quite a while, I just hadn’t been able to write it up until yesterday. As often happens with these things, I noticed three articles in that past 24 hours that tie in really nicely with that post.

The first is Jeff Weiner’s Avoiding the Unintended Consequences of Casual Feedback, which talks about the kind of feedback executives should give to their teams:

Years ago, a former direct report of mine helped bring this point home. While he and his team welcomed my input, he observed that oftentimes what I thought was a take-it-or-leave-it remark would create a massively disruptive fire drill. Up until that moment, I had no idea my opinion was being weighted so heavily.

To address the issue and to ensure that the team and I were on the same page with regard to situations like that, we developed three categories to describe any feedback I provided (either in conversation or via email): One person’s opinion, strong suggestion, or mandate.

Next is Michael Lopp’s Chaotic Beautiful Snowflakes, which talks about the unintended work that managers often create without even knowing it:

The fact is that you significantly underestimate the amount of work that you generated this morning. You could document and communicate the obvious work, but you can’t document all the unexpected side effects of your actions. In a large population of people, it’s close to impossible for an individual to perceive and predict the first order consequences of their well-intentioned actions let alone the bizarre second order effects once those consequences get in the wild.

Finally, there’s John Maeda and Becky Bermont’s Building a Design Culture in an ‘End-Up’ Technology World, which talks about the elements of a good design culture in larger corporations:

In the end, building a great design culture is not the goal in and of itself. What it does is allow a company to recruit great designers, and then supports their ability to build great products, along with their counterparts in product and technology. Start-ups and end-ups may each think that they other has an easier time building or sustaining a design culture, but it takes work at any stage of the game.

All three articles are great companion pieces to what I wrote yesterday. I realized this morning that even though the traffic on yesterday’s post wasn’t huge, it will always be a personal favorite of mine, because it documents a lesson learned from a lot of sweat and frustration. And those are often the best lessons you can teach yourself.

Rob Horning’s Me Meme is not an easy read, but it’s worth the investment. He doesn’t waste time with a fluffy intro, he just jumps straight in:

With social media, the compelling opportunities for self-expression outstrip the supply of things we have to confidently say about ourselves. The demand for self-expression overwhelms what we might dredge up from “inside.” So the “self” being expressed has to be posited elsewhere: We start to borrow from the network, from imagined future selves, from the media in which we can now constitute ourselves.

There are too many great quotes in here to choose from, so I’ll go with one more and then just encourage you to read the whole thing:

We shift from consumerist pleasures of fantasizing about how owning certain branded goods would make us into a certain kind of person and secure us a certain sort of affirmation to fantasizing about triumphant moments of social quantification, about getting likes and retweets, having lots of Tumblr activity, etc. […] Without viral content, you are in danger of becoming a blank.

Jason Green writes about The Promise, Progress, And Pain Of Collaboration Software:

Given the explosion of communication, conversations can take place simultaneously over several competing channels, creating confusion and inefficiency by requiring multiple changes in context. In addition, the ability to access prior content easily and seamlessly across all these communication channels becomes more challenging.

Between email, Trello, Slack, and InVision, we’re definitely feeling this pain as well. App Fatigue, indeed.

Jason Kottke in The revenge of the nerds:

On the very public stage of the web, the nerds of the world finally had something to offer the world that was cool and useful and even lucrative. The web has since been overrun by marketers, money, and big business, but for a brief time, the nerds of the world had millions of people gathered around them, boggling at their skill with this seemingly infinite medium.

There’s been a lot of talk about the web we lost in recent months. It’s now gone mainstream with TechCrunch calling the phenomenon The Fourth Internet:

If the first Internet was “Getting information online,” the second was “Getting the information organized” and the third was “Getting everyone connected” the fourth is definitely “Get mine.” Which is a trap.

I certainly understand where everyone is coming from with this. I also go on about the importance of self-publishing on your own domain (or as Jeremy Keith calls it, “selfish publishing”). And I also miss the old Twitter, back when it was about discussions and sharing knowledge, and not about big brands taking over our feeds with promoted photos.

But we also have to remember that the web is always going to be an Eternal September. So many new people are coming online every day, and they don’t know our “rules”, so they make up their own. And as much as we might long for earlier days, that’s how progress happens — through the actions of people who don’t know what they’re supposed to do.

So, sure. Let’s continue to publish on our own sites, and shout loudly about the virtues of doing so. But let’s not make people feel like unwanted newbies when they dream up a different web. We need them as much as they need us.

I found Ellis Hamburger’s view on what’s wrong with Facebook quite interesting. From Facebook’s friend problem:

In the real world, losing touch with people happens naturally and effortlessly, but on Facebook, unfriending is reserved only for breakups and acts of malice. So, the ghosts floating through my News Feed vastly outnumber the friends I’ve kept. My Friends list went from a roster of my current friends to a collection of everyone I’ve met in the last 10 years — a social group too massive to feel urgent, and too broad to share with on a daily basis.

Facebook is broken for its earliest users, and perhaps soon, for many of its new ones as well.

Paul Ford’s The Great Works of Software is definitely going on my “Best of 2014” list:

The greatest works of software are not just code or programs, but social, expressive, human languages. They give us a shared set of norms and tools for expressing our ideas about words, or images, or software development. Great software gives us tremendous freedom, as long as we work within its boundaries.

Seriously, read the whole thing…

In The Surprisingly Large Cost of Telling Small Lies Rebekah Campbell looks at the problem with lying in the context of entrepreneurship and creating products:

Peter maintains that telling lies is the No. 1 reason entrepreneurs fail. Not because telling lies makes you a bad person but because the act of lying plucks you from the present, preventing you from facing what is really going on in your world. Every time you overreport a metric, underreport a cost, are less than honest with a client or a member of your team, you create a false reality and you start living in it.

And it’s extremely difficult to get out of that reality once you’ve created it.

We all know how destructive interruptions at work are, and how a constant pressure to always be online increases stress levels exponentially. The thing is, we can fix this problem. Clive Thompson asks Are You Checking Work Email in Bed? At the Dinner Table? On Vacation? and reports on a recent study to measure the effects of changing that behavior:

[Harvard professor Leslie] Perlow suggested they carve out periods of “predictable time off”—evening and weekend periods where team members would be out of bounds. Nobody was allowed to ping them. The rule would be strictly enforced, to ensure they could actually be free of that floating “What if someone’s contacting me?” feeling.

The results were immediate and powerful. The employees exhibited significantly lower stress levels. Time off actually rejuvenated them: More than half said they were excited to get to work in the morning, nearly double the number who said so before the policy change. And the proportion of consultants who said they were satisfied with their jobs leaped from 49 percent to 72 percent. Most remarkably, their weekly work hours actually shrank by 11 percent—without any loss in productivity. “What happens when you constrain time?” Lovich asks. “The low-value stuff goes away,” but the crucial work still gets done.

More of this in our workplaces, please.

Mat Honan’s Are Touchscreens Melting Your Kid’s Brain?1 set off the latest in what has become a recurring tech theme over the past few years:

I’m perpetually distracted, staring into my hand, ignoring the people around me. Hit Refresh and get a reward, monkey. Feed the media and it will nourish you with @replies and Likes until you’re hungry and bleary and up way too late alone in bed, locked in the feedback loop. What will my daughter’s loop look like? I’m afraid to find out.

This has been a difficult topic for me for a long time. In 2012 I wrote an article for Smashing Magazine called A Dad’s Plea To Developers Of iPad Apps For Children, in which I aired some of my frustrations with apps for kids. That piece brought out a lot of anger, including a comment that I’ll never forget:

Wow really?? great parents here.. having a kid under 7 stare at a screen, really?? come on!! no kid under 7 should use an iPad for what?? play outside, play with your toys, your friends, read. People who have a 2yr old use an ipad/iphone, shouldn’t have kids in the first place! shame on you

I started writing a passionate reply, explaining our reasoning and the rules my wife and I have for screen time, but I ended up just dropping it. No one has ever changed their opinion based on a comment they read on a blog, so why bother.

Anyway, I digress. I tend to agree with Robert McGinley Myers’ response to Mat’s article. In Screens Aren’t Evil (which you should read in its entirety) he says:

But we need to get beyond worrying about whether “screens” are melting our kids’ brains. What we need to be conscious of is encouraging our kids, and ourselves, to engage in activities that enrich us. Sometimes that’s interacting with each other, sometimes that’s a hike in the forest, sometimes thats a great book, and sometimes that’s an incredible video game. It’s not the medium that matters, but what we take from it.

Now that’s a moderate stance I can get behind.

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1. Betteridge’s law alert! ↩