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Weeknote #13

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

This week I have been mostly…

In the office

I had a rare week where I spent each day in the office. But then it’s August – not exactly busy time on the education and/or conference front…

Helping with #edjournal

I was pleased to be able to connect James Michie and Nick Dennis, who each independently came up with the idea for a learning-focused educational journal. They’ve run with the idea and #edjournal: where’s the learning? looks like it’s soon going to be a reality. I’m delighted! 😀

Setting up a touchscreen kitchen PC

This has been too long in coming, but finally we’ve got a solution for family organization and cohesion. I’ve sold some stuff on eBay and have bought an MSI Wind Top AE1900 touchscreen PC. It fits rather wonderfully in the kitchen. We’re using it for calendars (Cozi.com), news (newsmap.jp), music (Spotify) and  TV/radio (BBC iPlayer). It’s on been in there three days but now I can’t imagine life without it!

Watching the Wrestler

My Dad and I attempted to go and see The A-Team movie on Wednesday. Not a good time to go as Orange Wednesdays meant we couldn’t even get near the box office! We came back to my house and watched The Wrestler in our cinema room. What a powerful and well-written/directed/produced film! Moving.

Being lax on the exercise front

I only ran twice this week and did my weights once. Must. Do. Better. It really does affect my productivity! 😮

4 solutions to office-based productivity-sappers.

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

There are, broadly, four productivity-sappers in the average office environment:

  1. Online distractions
  2. Offline distractions
  3. Email wrangling
  4. Meetings

Here’s what I do to counteract these:

  1. Use ‘location-based chunking’ of stuff I’ve got to do. In other words, I sit in different places (my desk, conference table, sofa, beanbag, other room) depending on what I’m doing.
  2. Turn the music up in those headphones.
  3. Be disciplined. I don’t send an email unless I have to. Any more than two replies within an hour means picking up the phone. I limit myself to five sentences.
  4. Try to manouvere myself into a situation where I can call time without annoying anybody. I try to couch my language in terms of positive forward steps, having at the back of my mind Seth Godin’s call to STOP.

5 steps to making other people more productive.

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

It’s all very well making a commitment to your own personal productivity, but if your workflow depends on other people you need them to be productive too!

Here’s some suggestions for prompting other people to up their game* that I’ve used to good effect in various workplaces. 🙂
Continue reading “5 steps to making other people more productive.”

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