September 2012
21 posts
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Happy Monday everyone, and happy building your way to LOT!
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How Reddit Builds a Progress Record (and the Front...
Reddit, the popular social content site and community, hands power to the people to decide what’s important and what’s not. iDoneThis likewise hands the reins to Reddit’s team to use how they see fit.
With the Reddit team scattered, from San Francisco to New York and in between, the challenge may be to get a virtual team on the same page. Yet, the main use of iDoneThis for the Reddit team is...
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Account Association Security Threats for Google...
iDoneThis recently added itself to the Google Apps Marketplace and the Google Chrome Web Store, providing OpenID single-sign-on access to iDoneThis through Google accounts. It’s a great feature to have, but as we found during our implementation, one rife with security concerns. Security advisories from both Google [2] and the OpenID foundation [3] pointed out possible vulnerabilities with...
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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
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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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