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Posts tagged “productivity”

4 February 2024

No running in airports

Every time I travel, just before I leave the house, I do a weird thing. I stop at the front door of our house, look myself in the mirror, and say out loud: “Remember, no running in airports today”. Travel is inherently stressful and I’ve found that once it boils over into having to run to catch a flight, I lose my ability to deal with things well. So I try to remind myself to keep calm and walk on.

Of course, there are a lot of variables in the “no running in airports” equation that are out of my control. A delay might cause a tight connection. A messed up security line could take longer than expected. I could miss a gate reassignment and try to board the wrong flight (yes, that happened). And yet, that statement helps to ground me in the two most important things I can do to stay in control of my travel day: be prepared (know when to go where, renew my Flighty subscription, etc.), and pay attention to detail (um, just, you know… read the gate assignment right).

I was thinking about this as I was getting ready to head into another workweek. There seems to be a lot of “running in airports” going on in the tech world right now, and it sometimes feels like it gets too much to handle. So what would it mean in a work context to look in the mirror on Monday morning and say out loud: “Remember, no running in airports today”? Yes, lots of variables are out of our control, but how could we be prepared and pay attention to detail in a way that reduces some of the likelihood of that happening?

For me? I could be prepared by looking ahead at my calendar and making sure I am spending my time in the right meetings—and that I go into them knowing exactly what is expected of me and what we expect to get out of them. I could try to anticipate “delayed flights”—those unexpected wrenches in projects—and what I could do to get things back on track if that happens.

I could pay attention to detail by listening intently when people speak, by hearing the meanings and feelings underneath the words in meetings where things seem a little wobbly. By noticing when “a gate assignment changed” (no, I’ll never stop being embarrassed about that one) and preemptively figuring out how and why it happened and what I can do about it.

There are, of course, no guarantees. But I still firmly believe that teams make better products in calm environments. Just like in travel, we can’t really create calm. The planes are going to do what they do. But we can remind ourselves that the goal is not to run, and that we have some agency over that.

Here’s to not running in airports this week.

9 December 2023

Why meeting overload happens, and what to do about it

Anne Helen Petersen brings some much-needed clarity to the meeting overload debate in The Root of Over-Meeting Culture. It’s worth reading this one in full because she takes her time to lay out the argument logically, but a few of things especially stood out to me.

When their team was fully in the office, managing probably felt straightforward. Most people managed by, well, looking and walking around. That was the heart of it. Now, figuring out what your team is doing, and how they feel about doing it, it’s a lot more work. So managers not only feel like they’re doing more work — and less productive themselves, as workers — but they also feel like they’re doing a worse job, and have less insight into what their reports are doing.

This is a good point that I don’t see talked about much. One of the reasons that RTO policies have become so prevalent is the lack of visibility that managers feel about the work their teams are doing. There are way better solutions to this problem than forcing a return to the office (regular async updates, clear priorities, etc.), but that seems to be the default approach to deal with what is essentially a communication problem, not a presence problem.

More talk about prioritization = more manager confidence (that their reports are doing the things that matter most) and more employee confidence (that they’re doing what they should be doing). It’s difficult to understate just how powerful this sort of clarity can be.

Related to the previous quote, +1 to this! No one on the team should be wondering if they’re working on the right things, and what they should be doing next. This is, in my opinion, the most important job of the 1:1 meeting, and why that meeting has to be (at least) weekly.

I have all the reservations about AI that other smart people do, but one of its real potentials is summarizing meetings in a way that makes people feel like they understood what happened and whether or not their input is needed after the fact without having to attend the actual meeting.

Another big +1 to this. Gong does this incredibly well by summarizing sales calls, pulling out action items, providing searchable transcripts and call insights, and more.

There are some pretty wild stats in the post about how meeting time has increased 252% since 2020. Some of that is necessary because of the shift to remote work, but not all of it. We somehow still view meetings as the default solution to figuring out what’s going on in an organization. I wrote Good / Bad Remote Worker before the pandemic, but I think this principle is more important than ever:

A good remote worker always thinks about collaboration through the lens of asynchronous communication. Remote work naturally creates great environments for deep, focused work, so it makes sense to optimize for asynchronous communication. This lets everyone get involved when it works best for them — and when they are ready to give something their full attention.

A bad remote worker tries to recreate an open office environment through too many meetings and other forms of synchronous communication. Meetings aren’t inherently bad. But unnecessary meetings and synchronous feedback sessions undermine one of the most significant benefits of remote work and should be used sparingly.

2 December 2023

Zoom Fatigue is Real, According to Brain Scans

I don’t think anyone will be surprised to hear that we now have brain scan research that shows that Zoom fatigue is a real thing:

The brain and heart readings suggested that videoconferencing led to significantly greater signs of fatigue, sadness, drowsiness, and negative feelings, as well as less attention and engagement, than a face-to-face lecture. The questionnaires also showed the volunteers felt significantly more tired, drowsy, and fed up and less lively, happy, and active from videoconferencing than face-to-face sessions.

Just so we don’t make the wrong conclusions based on this… the research does not mean that remote work is bad for you. It does mean that we need more communication to be asynchronous, and rely less on synchronous, office-analogous methods of communication when we work remotely.

16 October 2023

How GitHub Engineering communicates

This is a great document outlining the communication principles followed by GitHub Engineering. I’d say this is broadly applicable to teams and organizations—not just Engineering. I love this point about making work visible:

Capturing and exposing processes through URLs also helps make your work more visible. So work in the open and proactively share your work to the widest extent practical. As we continue to grow as an organization, points of collaboration will become even more important as we try to reduce redundant work. Avoid hoarding information: Like in any production system, observability is key. And if you make something useful, find a way to make it available so others can benefit from it too.

21 August 2023

My Reading Philosophy in 17 Guidelines

I like Tracy Durnell’s Reading Philosophy in 17 Guidelines, especially this one:

Treat my To Be Read list as a stream to dip into, not a to-do list. I know I won’t get to all the books on my TBR.

It reminds me of an article from 2011 that I come back to often—The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything:

Now, everything gets dropped into our laps, and there are really only two responses if you want to feel like you’re well-read, or well-versed in music, or whatever the case may be: culling and surrender.

Culling is the choosing you do for yourself. It’s the sorting of what’s worth your time and what’s not worth your time. It’s saying, “I deem Keeping Up With The Kardashians a poor use of my time, and therefore, I choose not to watch it.” It’s saying, “I read the last Jonathan Franzen book and fell asleep six times, so I’m not going to read this one.”

Surrender, on the other hand, is the realization that you do not have time for everything that would be worth the time you invested in it if you had the time, and that this fact doesn’t have to threaten your sense that you are well-read. Surrender is the moment when you say, “I bet every single one of those 1,000 books I’m supposed to read before I die is very, very good, but I cannot read them all, and they will have to go on the list of things I didn’t get to.”

24 July 2023

Why the remote-work debate stays so heated

Allie Conti frames the remote work debate really well in this post. In short, how someone feels about remote work and “return to office” is extremely personal:

I’ve given you this narration of my personal experience because, for all the talk of productivity and metrics and company culture, the topic of returning to the office is intensely personal. My needs and desires, for a variety of reasons relating to my age, finances, circumstances, health situation, and lifestyle, might be very different from those of workers who fall elsewhere on any of those axes. Some working parents have said they might value flexibility at school-pickup time. Some workers of color have raised the benefit of being free from in-office microaggressions. Recent college graduates may want to go into the office to make friends. And of course, not all workers are able to work remotely. The physical space in which one works, or hopes to work, intersects with one’s most personal choices. It collides with and reveals what people value most.

It feels like we should find ways to cater for both types of preferences. Hybrid work environments are far from an ideal solution, but it is one way to meet in the middle.

19 July 2023

How to receive feedback with grace

Some good tips here from Kax Uson on How to receive feedback—especially when you don’t agree with it:

Validate the feedback with other people. There will be times when we don’t really trust the feedback we receive, or in some cases, the people who gave them to us. This is normal. When this happens, it’s worth cross-checking the feedback with the people we trust. I like to think of it as getting a 2nd opinion vs immediately dismissing the feedback or overthinking it.

10 July 2023

What Does Intellectual Humility Look Like?

I think all of us could do with a bit of help increasing our intellectual humility, since “when it comes to our beliefs and opinions, most of us are much more confident than we should be”.

People who are intellectually humble know that their beliefs, opinions, and viewpoints are fallible because they realize that the evidence on which their beliefs are based could be limited or flawed or that they may not have the expertise or ability to understand and evaluate the evidence. Intellectual humility involves understanding that we can’t fully trust our beliefs and opinions because we might be relying on faulty or incomplete information or are incapable of understanding the details.

Read on for some recommendations on how to be more mindful of our own intellectual blind spots—and not just because it’s worth pursuing truth:

Despite our sense that we are usually correct, we must accept that our views may sometimes turn out to be wrong. This kind of humility isn’t simply virtuous—the research suggests that it results in better decisions, relationships, and outcomes.

8 July 2023

You're in the right place

Here’s some great advice from Robin Sloan on how to find good educational content on YouTube:

These days, when I’m investigating a subject, I tend to go straight to Low View Count Scholarly YouTube, which is of course the version of YouTube you get when you append the term “lecture” to your search. When you hit a tranche of videos between forty and ninety minutes long, with between 500 and 5000 views, you know you’re in the right place.

This Google experiment is interesting and kind of related:

To make it easier for people to learn about topics they’re interested in, we’re experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on the YouTube mobile app Home feed.

6 June 2023

Why productivity might be falling in organizations

Here’s a good theory by Bruce Daisley about the real reason why productivity might be falling in organizations:

If you want to understand why productivity is falling, we need to look first at high levels of employee turnover. If we want to solve productivity issues the first step needs to be to lower the resignation rate.

We all know well when people quit their jobs a period of unproductivity commences: bosses and colleagues need to cover the work of the person leaving, the recruitment process takes unproductive attention and new starters take months to ramp up. As Ton says, ‘high employee turnover is ruinous for productivity’.

Blaming “low productivity” on the rise of remote work—like some publications are trying to do instead—seems pretty lazy.