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I Done This Support

Engaging Your Employees

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More satisfied and engaged employees perform better. In a Towers Watson study of some 90,000 employees across eighteen countries, companies with the most engaged employees reported a 19 percent increase in operating income, and a 28 percent growth in earnings per share. Companies whose employees had the lowest level of engagement had a 32 percent decline in operating income, and an 11 percent drop in earnings.

Tony Schwartz, “Transforming the Way We Work,” HBR

Investing in your employees’ happiness feeds the company’s bottom line. What do you do in your workplace to engage and satisfy employees?

3 Keys to Flow from a Professional Poker Player

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James Chin is a professional poker player living in Las Vegas, Nevada.  He has a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas.  

As a professional poker player, creating and maintaining flow is of great importance. It’s often the difference between a winning hand and losing your shirt.

What is flow?  To me, it’s the feeling of being perfectly adapted to my environment.  My working environment is the poker table.  Here’s how I do it.

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One Done at a Time

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Check out the beautiful infographic below on our how brains adapt to multi-tasking. New reports find that high-multi-taskers are “lousy at everything required for multi-tasking.”

Work or Creative Labor?

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Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus—these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid … Read more

Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret

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The wonder of Silicon Valley has been its rich history of producing incredibly capital efficient companies operating at massive scale.  No doubt part of that achievement lies in the capital efficiency of software engineering itself where technology gives incredible leverage to create and disrupt established industries.  Nevertheless, as a company scales, individual engineers need to work together in concert which results in the industry-agnostic problem of people management.

Unique from other industries, Silicon Valley’s natural inclination is not simply to find a solution to people management, it’s to create a scalable management model.  Of course, technology is the natural place to turn.

During Google’s growth stage, Larry Schwimmer, an early software engineer, stumbled upon a solution deceptively simple, but one that persists to this day at Google and has spread throughout the Valley.  In his system called Snippets, employees receive a weekly email asking them to write down what they did last week and what they plan to do in the upcoming week.  Replies get compiled in a public space and distributed automatically the following day by email.

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On Living the Dream

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I’m often surprised by how often I meet VCs/investors who seem to express interest in hearing my personal story of how I ended up going from being a math nerd to working as a big firm corporate lawyer to running a startup.  I remember telling Brad Burnham at Union Square Ventures something self-deprecating — like, “Oh it’s boring” — in an attempt to move the conversation away from questions I imagined he was asking merely as a courtesy, but in that moment and moments like it, I forget — I am a young guy living the dream.

I’m reminded of Randy Pausch’s lecture on achieving your childhood dreams and enabling the childhood dreams of others as two of the best things in life.

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Report Your Dones

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Wanting to report what you’ve gotten done is a perfectly natural inclination.  Before today, we had a rudimentary CSV export file and the option to copy and paste, but no doubt, iDoneThis users deserve better. Click and drag on the calendar to highlight multiple days’ worth of accomplishments. Where the yellow circle is in the … Read more

Rashik Parmar, President of IBM’s Academy of Tech, on Work and Dones

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Every company needs to re-invent it self regularly. Without guiding principles that are more than financially motivated, they will struggle with the transformation to capture new value.
 
– Rashik Parmar
         Rashik
We took time to catch up with Rashik Parmar, the President of IBM’s Academy of Technology. From across the pond, he shares with us his greatest Done from 2011, his work process, and the future of review processes in large corporations.

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The New Groupthink – Should Creatives Work Alone?

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The New Groupthink – Should Creatives Work Alone?

Looking to up your productivity? Research suggests that the best creativity comes from alone-time. 

Here are some of our favorite quotes pulled from the NYTimes article:

“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.”

– Picasso

“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

– Steve Wozniak 

What do you think?