The Science of Small Wins
Teams of all sizes struggle with their processes at some point in their lifetime. If you’re a startup, one of the your advantages is how quickly you can move in a space where the big boys take a while. But what happens when your team is in transition mode and needs to keep scaling up as quickly as it did in the beginning? And how do you this in a design capacity?
Employees often say that the best way to motivate them is with a raise. But that’s not really the truth. Only 20% of employers in North America say that a pay raise drives higher levels of performance. Most of your employees are effectively lying if they say that more money will make them a better worker.
We’re all guilty of hiding what really motivates us. But our internal desires are often very simple to identify.
We all have basic human needs that get to the root of what truly motivates us. The Self-Determination Theory states that people have three basic needs—autonomy, relatedness, and competence.
Autonomy is the freedom for employees to choose what to work on and when to do it. Relatedness is the need to have close relationships with team members. Competence is the desire to master challenging projects.
As a manager, if you can meet these universal needs, your employees will grow and thrive within your company. We’ll discuss these needs to show how you can empower your team to succeed.
Human resources needs a swift kick in the butt. I say this based on experience — I’ve done a lot of back-office work while running TypeFrag, Carbonmade and other companies. I’ve set up and managed payroll, benefits, and on-boarding of employees more often than I care to remember. It’s always a painful process that you put off to the last minute because you just don’t want to deal with it.
You’re swamped with a huge project when your boss suddenly asks you to complete another urgent assignment due tomorrow. Your heart’s beating a mile a minute and you’re wondering how you’re going to get this all done. But somehow you’re going to try to make it work.
Too much stress will overwhelm you, but too little stress leaves you bored and unmotivated. The right amount of stress motivates you to succeed instead of making you crack under pressure.
Your ability to thrive or choke under pressure is ultimately based on the Yerkes-Dodson Law: Moderate stress up to a certain point can actually improve your performance. But beyond that point, your performance suffers.
Stress management is actually built into your brain’s chemistry. Here’s the science behind your body’s stress levels so you can maximize your productivity.
As I got ready to launch GetDelight, my team and I created a last minute list of things we had left to do — we put it on GitHub and checked things off when completed.
When we first started I Done This, we had no subscriber list. But eventually we grew one six-figures in size — all because we offered people something for free. You just have to remember that addresses are valuable commodities: people are generally reluctant to give theirs up unless they’re going to get something of value in return.
You’re being interrupted every three minutes to handle something urgent. You have a report that’s due at the end of the day. But your coworker just called you into a meeting that will “just be a minute.” When you get back, you just have to send a quick email. After you start on that email, another coworker asks you to jump on a client call.
You don’t think you’re procrastinating because you’re busy every moment. But just because you’re super busy doesn’t mean you’re being productive. You’re actually guilty of a subtle form of procrastination known as priority dilution. This means you are distracted from focusing on your most important work. But it’s not your fault that you’re getting consumed with all these small disruptions. Your brain is actually hardwired to handle them. Here’s the science behind managing the small disruptions so you can be more productive.
Take a closer look at where procrastination originates in your brain, and you’re on your way to vanquishing the hidden form of procrastination that’s killing your productivity.
The average commute time in the United States is 25.4 minutes. Every hour of the day is precious when it comes to getting things done, which is why having to sit through a commute can be insufferable.
Rather than tuning out to the same playlist you hear every day, tune into a podcast — specifically about productivity. This list of productivity podcasts will inspire you and give you the tools to start forming better daily habits, so you get more done.
Make the most out of your commute by checking out some of the best productivity podcasts of 2016.
The Internet makes it a no-brainer to run a global business with a tiny staff, but for most ventures that means a direct mail operation out of a single office. Imagine setting up physical infrastructure in 195 countries with a lean team — if that sounds impossible, you might not have heard of RingCaptcha yet.
This is a guest post by Mathilde Collin from Front. Be sure to check out the Front Blog for more tips on managing team emails.
Transparency helps you move fast. Information isn’t siloed — it’s all readily available for the taking. You don’t need to ask questions, forward information about a customer, or attend a meeting to know what’s going on. Instead, anyone can get access to the information they need without having to jump through hoops to get it.
However, extending this transparency to email is tricky. It was initially designed for 1:1 conversation but has been adapted to team use over time. You can loop in the people you need on a single email with BCC or CC, but it’s hard to make email efficiently accessible to an entire team. At the same time, within every inbox is a goldmine of customer interactions, company history, and internal discussions — so not sharing that is depriving your team of valuable information.
Thanks to new tools, automation, and a bit of organization, you can turn your outdated email inbox into a fully transparent platform that will serve as a resource for your entire team. Here’s how to do that in three steps.