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I Done This Support

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Software

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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 interruption-driven multitasking that’s antithetical to a maker’s needs.

Digital connectivity empowers managers to collaborate with makers in creating, but without regard to when. Because modern collaboration tools flow so neatly within their kind of schedule, managers often don’t realize the costs to the maker. At iDoneThis, we use a bunch of awesome collaborative tools including Asana, Github, Campfire, Google Docs, Skype, and Trello, and we’ve observed how those tools can disrupt a maker’s schedule.

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Exercising Towards Happiness

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It’s how [exercise] make me feel: more energized, less stressed, more productive, more engaged and, yes, happier — better able to smell the roses and cope with the inevitable frustrations of daily life.

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.

What Happens When You Don’t Email?

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We’ve got these social expectations that are wrapped up in email. If an email comes, you’re expected to respond to it fast. We feel compelled to reply.

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 productive, and able to focus longer.

While there are great benefits to stepping away from email, it’s hard to escape the compulsion to be chained to work email. How do we shift social expectation and work culture on the instant timing of email? 

Empathy vs Apathy: The Best of the Internet

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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.

Reconsidering the Startup Open Floor Plan Office

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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.”

open floor plan office facebook

I admit that Zuck’s statement caught me off guard because I dislike the typical open floor plan office and so do most engineers that I know.  Many engineers wear headphones to create the missing wall so that they can concentrate and focus on coding without distraction.  We chose the small offices at WeWork in SOMA, SF, over co-working for those reasons.

The New York Times reported that recent research supported the hunch that open floor plan offices reduce productivity.  The research showed that ambient conversations at work and a noisy office space contributed to “a decline of 5 percent to 10 percent on the performance of cognitive tasks requiring efficient use of short-term memory, like reading, writing and other forms of creative work.”  According to the researcher, “Noise is the most serious problem in the open-plan office, and speech is the most disturbing type of sound because it is directly understood in the brain’s working memory.”

Nevertheless, the open floor plan office has become a shibboleth of startup culture.  It reflects our rejection of hierarchy, and our embrace of agility, collaboration and creativity, and as a result, many startups take the open floor plan for granted.

We’ve recently visited two startups, Shopify and Zappos, that are reconsidering and riffing off of the standard startup open floor plan office, and we’ve been inspired by what they’ve come up with to ensure that engineers have the relative solitude that they need to get in the zone, without reverting away from the promise of the open floor plan for serendipity, collaboration and work happiness.

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Acknowledging Workplace Emotions for Better Productivity

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In the workplace, we rarely share what’s going on beneath the surface. At most companies, the unspoken expectation is that you park your emotional life at the door, put on your game face, and keep things light and professional. In short, you bring a part of yourself to work and try to suppress the rest.

But at what cost — including to productivity?

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 helps us know how to work better. (We recommend maintaining a work diary to bring the rest of yourself to work!)