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I Done This Support

The 40 Hour Work Week

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[E]very hour you work over 40 hours a week is making you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul. And it may sound weird, but it’s true: the single easiest, fastest thing your company can do to boost its output and profits — starting right now, today — is to get everybody off the 55-hour-a-week treadmill, and back onto a 40-hour footing.

Sara Robinson in her popular Salon piece makes the case for the 40 hour work week, and it’s hard not to nod in agreement to the guideline of “eight for work, eight for sleep and eight for what we will.”

Are you nodding too? What about you, hard-working entrepreneurs?

Time is a Choice

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Instead of saying “I don’t have time” try saying “it’s not a priority,” and see how that feels. Often, that’s a perfectly adequate explanation. I have time to iron my sheets, I just don’t want to. But other things are harder. Try it: “I’m not going to edit your résumé, sweetie, because it’s not a priority.” “I don’t go to the doctor because my health is not a priority.” If these phrases don’t sit well, that’s the point. Changing our language reminds us that time is a choice. If we don’t like how we’re spending an hour, we can choose differently.

Laura Vanderkam puts your perception of how busy you are in poignant, new light – WSJ, Are You As Busy As You Think?

Teach People How To Learn

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I was once asked: if an organization could teach only one thing to its employees, what single thing would have the most impact? My answer was immediate and clear: teach people how to learn. How to look at their past behavior, figure out what worked, and repeat it while admitting honestly what didn’t and change it.

A strategic advisor to CEOs and leadership teams, Peter Bregman writes that the most impactful thing that an organization can do for employees is to teach people how to learn by spending a few minutes reflecting at the end of the day.

As our iDoneThis users already know, there is indeed efficiency in slowing down!

Thirty Minutes a Day: How to Learn

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We have a fucked-up perception of time. We count hours but discount how they’re spread out. It’s binge-learning and it’s no way to grow.

Check out writer and designer Jack Cheng’s great piece from a couple years back, Thirty Minutes a Day on the best way to learn something new.

Cheng mentions the same Seinfeld calendar productivity trick that helped spark the creation of iDoneThis, pointing out that “When trying to develop a new skill, the most important thing isn’t how much you do; it’s how often you do it.”

We’re here to help you record your 30 minutes a day!

Work vs Sleep: Getting Stuff Done

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Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals and co-author of Rework, found that when people wanted to get stuff done, their answer was rarely the office but instead someplace where they wouldn’t encounter externally imposed distractions. What’s perhaps most insightful about Fried’s 2010 TEDxMidwest talk is his comparison of work to sleep when thinking about why stretches of uninterrupted time are … Read more

How Sourceninja Gets an Extra 7 Hours of Productivity Every Week

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We went through AngelPad with the guys at Sourceninja, so we’re proud that they’re one of our oldest and most loyal customers.  Sourceninja is worry-free open source management made simple.

Sourceninja

One of the first lessons of AngelPad that the founder Thomas Korte impressed upon us was to maximize every minute of every meeting, because time spent in meetings has a multiplier effect.  Every meeting costs the number of minutes it takes multiplied by the number of people in the meeting.

For the Sourceninja team, this used to mean 20 minute standups for their four-member team on a daily basis.  20 minutes five days a week for four people multiplies out to close to 7 hours per week spent in their daily standup.

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