For your Monday morning.

[randomness]

Jason Fried, of 37Signals, a web productivity tool company, giving a fifteen-minute TED talk on why work doesn't happen at work.

In short, he says it's because "meetings and managers are two major problems in businesses today, especially to offices." "what you find is that, especially with creative people -- designers, programmers, writers, engineers, thinkers -- that people really need long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done." "managers are basically people whose job it is to interrupt people." "what's even worse is the thing that managers do most of all, which is call meetings." "The manager calls the meeting, so the employees can all come together, and it's an incredibly disruptive thing to do to people"..."Because meetings aren't work. Meetings are places to go to talk about things you're supposed to be doing later."

Now truthfully, he's talking his book, because later he talks about how one can use technologies which he asserts interrupt less to make the office less disruptive. But I do think there's a useful point here: that the modern office is an interruption factory, and that this is a problem for productivity.

I've worked in an office, and I've worked from home. Working from home makes me more productive, but this is only useful if I'm doing the right things, which is where working in an office is useful: it's where you talk to your co-workers to make sure you're doing the right things.

My ideal work place would include working from home interspersed with occasional visits to the team I was working with. How occasional those visits would be really depends on the nature of the work and the team.

But yes, he's totally right about the interrupting managers.

(via Farnham Street blog)

Comments

[cerridwynn.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I'm actually not sure i agree with all of this. Maybe i'm lucky, but i have found (most of) the meetings at my company to be totally necessary and very useful. The idea of a "no talk" day is horrifying to me -- it makes me think of my miserable, isolating grad school experience, where i could go weeks without talking to anyone. I couldn't get anything done in such a vacuum.

I guess it's a personality thing? Some of us need to collaborate -- we need to talk to people and share ideas in order to get excited and be productive.

Now, of course, I DO work from home. I pretty much have that ideal work place you mention -- i visit the office every 2 months or so. But i also call in every day to a 15 minute meeting and that is so key for me. It keeps me connected to my team and makes me feel accountable. I'm also regularly on the phone with people -- IM and email just aren't the same. And, frankly, i am at least as productive in the office as i am working from home -- i talk to people less at home, sure, but i make up for that with time on LJ and FB (and i don't feel bad about those breaks -- they keep me sane).

Also, as someone in exactly the kind of creative job he's talking about, i can't imagine not collaborating. If i didn't meet with the production team how would we share ideas? How would i explain things to the artist? How would i hear and incorporate his great ideas? These are all things that are very difficult to communicate in the passive modes he proposes.

I'm sure this talk is backed up by research, but so much of it just doesn't make sense to me.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't either. I think there's a balance to be struck. And, as in_parentheses points out above, it depends on what kind of person you are.

One thing I said above and would emphasize is that it's all well and good to have plenty of time to make progress on your own...as long as the progress is in the right direction. And that's where the meetings come in.

I think his talk is backed up by the fact that his company produces software tools for passive communication. :)