I am paying a lot more attention to flow these days and my productivity is already improving.
One of the best things about working from home is more control of your work environment but in almost any work environment you do have some control.
A few lives ago I worked in a company with an unhealthy addiction to CC; every email went to everyone it seamed and it was easy to get hundreds of internal emails a day.
In reaction I turned of automatic email fetch and started to only hit send/receive 3 times a day. Some colleagues who sent emails like “can you come into my office” were thrown at first by my lack of immediate response but they got the hang of it and my productivity increased. Read the rest of this entry »
You sit down at your desk or work-bench and begin, at some point you feel it must be time for lunch but when you look at the clock you realize it’s time for dinner; you lost track, completely absorbed in what you were doing.
Flow is the term Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced in his book of the same name Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. He studied thousands of athletes, artists and workers from all walks of life; Surgeons and line workers, programmers and mechanics from all over the world. Through his research he identified what he calls the eight common characteristics of flow.
The books hypothesis is that by recognizing the common mechanics of flow we can all achieve it in most of the tasks we do each day, therefore making us more productive, focused and happy.
Both personally and as a team leader I find the idea that the state of flow can be manufactured intriguing. The first three characteristics from the eight I think of as the framework needed to achieve a state of flow in any task. Read the rest of this entry »
I try to keep my social networks small. LinkedIn is limited to people I have physically met for business. Facebook is limited to family and friends I have met in the real world and twitter.. actually I am still trying to work out how I want to use twitter, news source? Chat room? Friends? Work?
Anyway, as with all social networks there are some people who are more important to me than others and it is this fact above all else that is moving me to Gist.
In Gist I can rank my contacts. With about 700 people in my networks (I meet people for a living) plus about 100 company blogs/twitter accounts I track reading their combines social media output is like drinking from a fire hose, chronologically tackling the stack is just not efficient. Read the rest of this entry »
I have been testing Tungle for a month or two now and I like it so I have added tungle.me widgets to this blog and my facebook page.
For me the value of tungle is that it is a more flexible and more polite way to set up meetings. I don’t pick a time for a meeting, I provide my client with a selection of times that work for me and they pick the one that works best for them.
Tungle.me is a way of letting people proactively book meetings with me. They suggest times and reason for a meeting using my tungle.me page and I pick the time slot that works for me. Tungle sends both of us meeting invites to go in our calendars.
As a manager running a team or a company everyone wants a piece of your time. So you prioritize, organize and fit as many valuable meetings into a day as possible. But you should cancel at least 50% of them and here’s why.
Most of your meetings are probably internal. Weekly meeting with marketing, development, IT, Sales, HR and Finance teams. Throw into that a bunch of meetings or calls with investors & the board, department heads requesting budgets or updating you on projects, the hour you carve out of each day for email (most of it internal) and your day is full.
Read the rest of this entry »
I have been playing with Gist today. Gist is a CRM that brings in contact data from all over the web to help you keep track of all your contacts and what they are doing. Nice idea but it’s still too labor intensive to get set up and the stream reading interface is not as nice as google reader.. but its beta so growing pains are to be expected.
The idea is good, aggregate the blog feeds, twitter updates, linkedin profile updates, facebook updates, company website news from all your contacts in one place. Save you bouncing between Tweetdeck, google reader and facebook to find out what people are doing.
Read the rest of this entry »
I have been testing Tungle for a few weeks now and I’m very impressed so far.
I was attracted to it for a few reasons;
- I am now working for a virtual group with members on different networks, companies and OS’s.
- I have always wanted to be able to share my availability with people I am trying to set a meeting with
now I can at tungle.me/stephenpeacock
- I like the idea of offering people a choice when I am propose a meeting.. its just polite. Read the rest of this entry »
