"Make a meeting better, or an engineer more productive." ~ @jslavet
Adam Rifkin stashed this in Engineers!
Stashed in: #lifehacks, Startups, Productivity, Flow, Meetings, Management, Greylock, Fixitfixitfixit!
I'm enjoying James Slavet's Forbes article Five New Management Metrics You Need To Know:
1. Ideal "flow" is 30-50%. "Ideally programmers and other knowledge workers can spend 30% – 50% of their day in uninterrupted concentration. Most office environments don’t even come close. To get started, ask your engineers to track for a few days their personal flow state percentages... And then brainstorm ways that the team can move this number up."
2. Give more challenging work than standard work. "His goal was to keep all of his students in the pocket between boredom and anxiety – but closer to anxiety. In other words, we shouldn’t be so overwhelmed that we break down and give up, but we also shouldn’t be coasting either."
3. Score meetings for effectiveness. "Nobody tracks whether meetings are useful, or how they could get better. And all you have to do is ask. In the last minute of a meeting, ask the participants to each rate from 1 to 10 how effective the meeting was, with one suggestion for making the meeting better."
4. Get 1% better each week. "Try asking your team this question: how did you get 1% better this week? Did you learn something valuable from our customers, or make a change to our product that drove better results?"
5. Positive interactions should outnumber negative ones 5:1. "Marriages that succeed tend to have five times as many positive interactions as negative ones... The same is true at the office, where you’re often connected for years in relationships with people who can either become wary of your criticisms or eager to give you their best effort."
Net-net: "Improve the company at an atomic level: make a meeting better, or an engineer more productive."
2:40 PM Dec 13 2011