Excellent advice from Jerry Seinfeld on productivity.
Years ago when Seinfeld was a new television show, Jerry Seinfeld was still a touring comic. At the time, I was hanging around clubs doing open mic nights and trying to learn the ropes. One night I was in the club where Seinfeld was working, and before he went on stage, I saw my chance. I had to ask Seinfeld if he had any tips for a young comic. What he told me was something that would benefit me a lifetime…
Read: Motivation: Jerry Seinfeld’s productivity secret - Lifehacker
Tasks Jr. is a lightweight, freeware online to-do list. It’s written in PHP and uses a MySQL database. It even has a PDA accessible mode & calendar (though, I just use Google Calendar). Tasks, Tasks Pro and Use Tasks are the various pay versions.
I’ve searched long & hard for a good computer-based to-do list that’s portable, easy to use & not in some weird proprietary format that’ll become inaccessible if I switch computers (I.e. Outlook & Thunderbird’s formats). I always thought it would be something that sat in the system tray & let me save to a file that I could back up along with all my other important files, but it turns out a web-based to-do list did the trick.
Visit: Tasks Jr. : King Design
Full Disclosure: This is an unpaid & unsolicited endorsement.
Netflix has an interesting vacation policy - there is no policy. As long as you’re getting your work done, they don’t care how much you’re in the office. This kind of self-directed work is rare. I’ve blogged poetic about how being forced to stay at the workplace when there is no work to be done is a punishment for doing your work. I never thought I’d see a workplace that understood this, but Netflix does.
American workers get a median of 10 vacation days after one year on the job and 15 days after five years of work, according to Hewitt. One in three Americans doesn’t use all their vacation, and barely one in 10 takes a break for two weeks straight, according to the non-profit research firm Families and Work Institute. But at Netflix, it’s estimated that most employees take off about 25 to 30 days per year, using the time to stay at home with the kids, travel to Cambodia, or visit relatives in India. It’s “estimated” because Netflix does not record vacation time, said McCord.
“I’ve never terminated a salaried employee for being tardy or being absent,” McCord said. “There have been issues when people didn’t come to work - but the issue is the work, it’s not the time off.”
Read: San Jose Mercury News - Vacation policy at Netflix: Take as much as you want
A number of recent studies show that people simply can’t multi-task well. The potential loss to productivity is huge. While some in the tech industry have known about this for a long time, (the 1987 book Peopleware warns of the dangers of task switching) the public at large is probably unaware of how much productivity is lost just by checking your email.
Several research reports, both recently published and not yet published, provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. The findings, according to neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors, suggest that many people would be wise to curb their multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car.
Read: Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don’t Read This in Traffic - New York Times