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

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yes. As I said, he's talking his book.

One thing I've discovered is that how you manage people who are self-directed is entirely different from how you manage those who aren't. The former generally do very well with managers who let them know what's expected and then get out of their way. The latter need more direct involvement. But managing either with the tactics for the other results in serious problems.

I think the video can be a useful corrective to managers who only know how to manage people who aren't self-directed.

[karakara98.livejournal.com]

hmm, I think the trick is to make sure that the manager in this case is able to let the self directed employee "know what's expected." I think my challenges as a manager have been about conveying that information up front and providing the appropriate level of guidance. One of my team is highly self directed and efficient, but for about the first year we had a problem because we didn't have a good understanding between us of what the expectations were for outcomes. I didn't know what or how to explain, and she didn't know how to ask. This resulted in a few projects that were very well done, but the wrong thing, which was frustrating for both of us. I've found that insisting on a couple of check ins per week (one in person, one email) on general work and meetings as needed on projects gives us the needed contact. That may be "getting out of the way" for the purposes of this discussion, but in general I've found that no contact between project beginning and finished product doesn't work so well.