September 2012
21 posts
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GetWorkDoneMusic is a webapp by Ryan Ghods that plays music to help you get your work done … fast, or faster. The mostly electronic music is randomly pulled from SoundCloud playlists, and you can replay tracks you like, or skip to the next one.
What’s on your productivity playlist?
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Collaboration is Noisy
When did work become so noisy? I don’t just mean the ambient noise, that clickity-clackity typing, strangely noticeable chewing, annoying finger tapping, and chit-chatting hubbub of an open floor plan office. I’m also talking about the information and social inundation invading our work life, the buzzes and pings, the tweets and likes, the emails and comments, the meetings and chats.
Our notion...
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How iDoneThis aspires to build a product that fulfills a maker’s schedule while meeting the manager’s needs.
However you walk the talk is what builds your company culture. And so are your values.
How do you give difficult feedback to a team leader?
A team-building scavenger hunt that worked.
Our glimpse into how PagerDuty uses us!
Photo: Jackson Carson
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How PagerDuty Gets Intelligent Messaging Across
Systems down? Who you gonna call? PagerDuty is on it! The service dispatches alerts collected from system monitoring tools through email, SMS, phone, and mobile and provides no-fuss on-call management.
PagerDuty is all about intelligent messaging, integrating with tools you already have to notify the right person to deal with the problem, based on schedule and situation.
We’re fans of...
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Maker's Schedule, Manager's Software
Business software’s increasing focus on real-time collaboration, activity streams and consumerization threatens what Paul Graham called the “maker’s schedule” in the workplace. Makers need long blocks of uninterrupted time to concentrate on ambitious, creative work. The result of always-on availability, random notification, and constant information deluge is a work mode of...
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“It’s how [exercise] make me feel: more energized, less stressed, more...”
– Jane E. Brody, NYT Well, “Changing Our Tune on Exercise”
Brody writes about how reframing the message of why we should exercise as improving current happiness and well-being is more motivating than using hard-to-see long-term goals like losing weight and prevented disease.
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Water, water, water!
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“We’ve got these social expectations that are wrapped up in email. If an...”
– Gloria Mark, LA Times, Email Stress Test: Experiment unplugs workers for 5 days
Professor Mark did a study to find out what would happen if you did away with work email. She found that people were less stressed, simply communicated face-to-face more (what, human interaction!?), were more...
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A happy Labor Day to those of you in the US! Go get relaxin’ to honor all that work we do!
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Photo: Mohamed Muha
Happy Saturday all! Catch up with some of our favorites things we’ve shared during the week:
We wrote about reconsidering the startup open floor plan office.
Whitney Hess writes on empathy versus apathy and organizational culture.
Get rid of stupid rules at work.
The importance of building a company culture.
Open yourself to life.
August 2012
23 posts
8 tags
Reconsidering the Startup Open Floor Plan Office
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s plans for a new campus, a 420,000 square foot single-story warehouse made to look like “a hill in nature,” one giant room fitting thousands of people. He described their aspiration as wanting to build “the perfect engineering space.”
I admit that Zuck’s statement caught me off guard because I dislike the...
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“In the workplace, we rarely share what’s going on beneath the surface. At...”
– Tony Schwartz, in an HBR blog post, Seeing Through Your Blind Spots, talks about how acknowledging and understanding our emotions in the workplace are important to how well we work.
Paying attention to feelings, of others and of ourselves, and improving our communication regarding these emotions...
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Cheers to mistakes! Here’s the full quote about making mistakes from the excellent Neil Gaiman’s blog, totally worth reading before you get back to doing:
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more...
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NEWS FLASH: Everybody does not hate Mondays!
A recent Gallup poll found that workers who are engaged feel almost as good on the weekdays as they do on the weekends! Plus, learning and interestingness peaks for these happy, engaged workers during the workweek. In turn, they are more likely to be productive.
The bad news? Only 30% of U.S. workers were engaged in the first part of 2012.
How do...
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Have a lovely weekend folks!
And here’s a round-up of the best stuff we’ve shared on our blog, Twitter, and Facebook:
17 women startup leaders name their role models.
The significance of company culture.
What do successful people do the first hour of their day?
Spend more time in the bathroom.
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“You also have to have perseverance – and maybe that’s the hardest thing, to...”
– Maira Kalman talks to 99u about work and overcoming the challenges of the creative process. Her daily routine expressly involves avoiding work: “Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.” Kalman’s wisdom is endless.
from Kalman’s Principles of Uncertainty 