Super Volatile

Krzysztof Szafranek's link blog

Hi, I'm Krzysztof and I make websites.
When I'm not making websites, I read these.
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productivity

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Jul 25 / 7:45pm

The Acceleration of Addictiveness vs Willpower, Productivity, and Flow

Do you identify yourself primarily by your tastes, where you eat or shop, what brands you wear or gadgets you own, what bands you listen to or shows you watch, what websites you browse or feeds you read, or which apps you download and select for your home screen?

Or do you identify yourself by your creative output, what you cook or build, what writing, photographs, music, videos, websites, art or apps you make and publish?

more on tantek.com

Tantek Çelik writes about survival strategies in the world dominated by constant distraction and addictive pleasures.

Filed under: creativity   productivity  
 
Sep 14 / 7:26am

Living Efficiently

Every once in a while, someone posts an article on getting things done and managing your time on Hacker News. I know because I keep track of them. I immediately think, 'recovering procrastinator'.

The reason why I think this happens is that one of first things an IT geek does when he puts order to his life and starts getting things done is... getting his personal website done and writing about how he did it. That is true for me also.

more on jonasgalvez.com.br

Yet another productivity article, but this one has an interesting conclusion: living efficiently in the end means getting rid of lots of nice things. So is it worth it?

Filed under: lifehacks   productivity  
 
Jul 27 / 10:47pm

Macintosh Stories: -2000 Lines Of Code

Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.
more on folklore.org

So, even Apple was affected by the mania of ridiculous productivity metrics.

Filed under: apple   productivity   software development  
 
Jun 24 / 1:12am

How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

My measurement will be the parking lot: it should be substantially full at 7:30 AM and 6:30 PM. The pizza man should show up at 7:30 PM to feed the starving teams working late. The lot should be half full on Saturday mornings. We have a lot of work to do.
more on technocrat.net

A sad story of a manager believing that telling people to look busy will increase productivity and make them care.

Filed under: management   productivity  
 
Jun 15 / 10:13pm

How I write and time-manage

He’s great at reminding me, via his excellent talks and interviews, that it’s easier to be highly productive when you only have a limited time window in which to do so. It’s easier to perform an amazing, in-the-zone, four-hour block of work on a Friday night if I’m leaving town the next day and I know that it’s is the only chance I’ll get all week to work on Instapaper.
more on marco.org

On power of timeboxing and small-step progress. Also, the linked podcast with Merlin Mann and John Gruber is worth listening to. If for nothing else, then for opportunity to listen to Gruber's opinion on Mike Arrington.

Filed under: blogging   productivity  
 
Jun 15 / 10:10pm

The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People

You see, years back the famous psychologist B.F. Skinner discovered that rats would work much harder if the rewards were unpredictable (rather than a treat every 5 times they pressed a bar, one would come after 4, then 13, etc). This is the same as email, most of it is junk, but every so often, it’s fantastic: an email from the woman you’ve been chasing for instance.
more on danariely.com

“You are weighed in the balance, and found wanting.”

Filed under: productivity  
 
May 29 / 9:37pm

Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: 6 Lessons

Lesson Three is this: five-day weeks of eight-hour days maximize long-term output in every industry that has been studied over the past century. What makes us think that our industry is somehow exempt from this rule?
more on archives.igda.org

Excellent article on impact of overtime work on productivity. People regularly working long hours aren't heroes, they're slackers. I'd love every manager to read it.

Filed under: productivity   workplace  
 
May 24 / 9:30pm

The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours « RescueTime Blog

If we assume that our userbase is representative, that means:

  • Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
more on blog.rescuetime.com

How Google is destroying world economy.

Filed under: google   productivity  
 
May 17 / 11:15pm

Coding Horror: Yes, But What Have You *Done*?

Always. Be. Closing.
more on codinghorror.com

All books on productivity combined cannot surpass this scene from Glengarry Glen Ross.

Filed under: productivity  
 
May 15 / 9:37pm

Did Your Boss Thank You For Coding Yourself to Death?

Studies about productivity declines when working more than 40 hours a week surface with disturbing regularity. As a developer your creativity declines, you make more mistakes, you miss existing issue etc., to the point where you're doing more harm than good. Should I even mention the health concerns when you spend that much time engaged in the same activity (they even had rules about spending too much time at work in the Soviet Union, and those guys were all about putting in the time for the good of the people).
more on skorks.com

An excellent article on overtime programming work.

Filed under: productivity   software development