Project. Leadership. Time. Idea Sex in the Dream Factory. Living in Wellington, New Zealand, just up the road from Weta Workshop , is like having your nose pressed against the glass at the weirdest candy store on Earth. It's a pain in the ass of the highest order. The selection used to just be elves, orcs and the odd giant ape, but now things are multiplying like a virus: Everything from 1940s warplanes to Master Chief is in the air. Weta and the Peter Jackson industries are big business in our small city. You can hear them sometimes, at night, loud explosions in the hills. You can run into James Cameron or Bungie employees down at the local dairy. You can smell the chemicals that hold imaginary creatures together while their sculptors inhale and gibber. Can I has some? Sounds like our kind of town, said . Security would indeed be a problem; dobermans, lasers, helicopters, instincts honed by a decade of keeping intrusive assholes away from and .
"Sounds fun," said Rachel at Weta Workshops on the phone. "Great. Top 5 reasons to let employees telecommute. Should a company let its people telecommute? Is it good or bad for productivity? Does working from home make employees more stressed because it blurs the boundary between work and private life? Or is it good for families because it cuts down on time commuting and gives people more time at home? And is it true that most of the employees who work from home do so in the nude? Pennsylvania State University have just published a meta-study that looks at these questions. The study analyzes the results of 46 other studies on telecommuting involving a total of 13.000 employees. Main findings Here are the findings that struck me as being the most interesting. 1: Telecommuting gives employees a sense of freedom at work In other words, you feel that you have more control over your work environment.
This study found that the opposite is true and that telecommuting reduced conflicts between work and family. From the study: The main effects of telecommuting My take Your take What about you? Related posts. Headphones? I mean I love my music - I played as a resident DJ for a year spending all my student loan on records!
- but when I'm at work, I'm there to work, not to be entertained. I also understand that when you've got one of Nokia's latest remixes blasting out every five minutes, having some background music - some familiarity - can be a good way to get into the coding zone. Especially if you've got your bug hunting hat on: But what about senior coders? Doesn't it say in their job description that they are meant to help and mentor their more junior peers? But how can they recognise the signs of a coder-in-need if they are taking in their latest track from iTunes?
And then for managers and those in a leadership position, those who should be aware of the rest of the team at all times, how can they lead fully when they don't hear any or all that happens? It seems like there must be a happy medium somewhere between headphones on productivity and headphones off knowledge sharing. IGDA Forum: Gamelab's Herdlick On Managing A Happy Team. Catherine Herdlick, director of production at Gamelab, developers of the massively successful Diner Dash, among others, delivered a presentation entitled "Caught in the Middle: Managing Staff, Teams and Executives" at the IGDA Leadership Forum.
Her central tenet? "The idea is that happy people make better products... I say 'products' instead of 'better performers' because we're the game industry, and it's important to keep that product focus. We make games. " She followed with, "Keeping your staff happy, your executives happy too... it's not quite as hard as people think. It's just a little bit of the golden rule... as we get older it gets harder because we get bogged down by our responsibilities. " After polling the attendees and discovering that, like her, a number of them were middle managers, she remarked, "We're lucky to be caught in the middle, actually. " Communication Skills: The Key Key to listening is repeating what you heard. "I create policies at work. Roadblocks To Communication.
Productivity Toolbox: 37+ Tools for Taking Action and Getting Th. Last week we talked about how taking action is the first priority of a small business (or just about anything). This week it’s time to go beyond talk and start getting things done. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of the best resources and tools available for taking action, getting things done, and generally being productive. Project and Task Management Tools Actionthis.com ActionThis is a web-based service for managing projects and tasks and making sure they get finished.
They use your everyday tools to help you get stuff done and go home early. Actionize.com Actionize is a nearly complete system of small business tools. Basecamp.com Basecamp is the project management and collaboration tool from the well-known 37signals. Clarizen.com Clarizen is a project management system design with the goal of “Making Projects Real.” Productivity Blogs and Websites Lifehacker.com Lifehacker is a well known blog that writes about working smarter and living more productively. Motivation. » Time Management #8: Resources BoDo: Business of Design online. Posted by: Mark McGuinness Category: Creative Coaching Bookmark on: del.icio.us In this series I’ve given you my take on time management and how it can help or hinder creative work. In doing so, I’ve taken elements from different systems, having assimilated them over time and adapted them to my own needs.
If you are keen to investigate these systems, please make sure you try them one at a time! Otherwise you’ll end up confused. It’s worth devoting some time to working with a system until you know it really well, before deciding whether you need to add to it. The following are all resources I’ve used myself - if you have any recommendations of your own to share, please leave a comment. The e-book of this series - Time Management for Creative People If you enjoyed this series you can download it as a free e-book. My ‘GTD’ delicious bookmark My GTD del.icio.us bookmark is where I bookmark any web pages I find with useful material about time and workflow management. The creative process Software. Value Networks | Colabria. Paradigm Shift | Colabria. Cognitive Daily: Do deadlines help procrastinators? The Social Science Statistics blog (new to me, but it’s been around for a while) has a good writeup of a 2002 study by Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch which systematically examines the effectiveness of deadlines in preventing procrastination: They randomized participants into three categories: three evenly-spaced deadlines every 7 days; an end-deadline after 21 days; or a self-imposed schedule of deadlines within a three week period.Which one would you select if you could?
Maybe the end-deadline because it gives you the most flexibility in arranging the work (similar to a final exam or submitting your dissertation all at once)? Ariely and Wertenbroch found that the end-deadline does the worst both in terms of finding errors and submitting on time. Participants with evenly-spaced deadline did best. [update: added a figure below] Here’s a summary of the results for a proofreading task: