The dream employee for a lot of companies is a twenty-something with as little of a life as possible outside of work–someone who’ll be fine working fourteen-hour days and sleeping under his desk. But packing a room full of these burn-the-midnight-oil types isn’t as great as it seems. [. . .] You don’t need more hours; you need better hours. When people have something to do at home, they get down to business. They get their work done because they have somewhere else to be. They find ways to be more efficient because they have to.
-Rework
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The 37 Signals team behind the project management software I and thousands of others use daily (Basecamp) published a new book laying out some of the principles behind their success. They call Rework a “by product” of their business; the equivalent of a cookbook written by a chef confident enough that their mastery will still trump any upstart competitors armed with detailed instructions. One of the ideas promoted in Rework, after all, is to strengthen and promote your business by teaching–customers, other business owners, even competitors:
[E]mulate famous chefs. They cook, so they write cookbooks. What do you do? What are your “recipes”? What’s your “cookbook”? What can you tell the world about how you operate that’s informative, educational, and promotional? This book is our cookbook.
And it’s full of direct, combative, written-with-purpose recipes for running an un-apologetically small but thriving business. The book is organized into a series of brief essays on a variety of work topics; read on for a few passages I found particularly compelling and a special video dialogue where Jarred and I discuss the book:
Continue reading ‘Book Review: Rework’
Last week, I took a course over two half-days called “Getting Things Done.” Getting Things Done, or GTD, is a productivity methodology developed by David Allen, who was profiled last year by Wired. His book of the same name is a bestseller, and he now has a consulting and coaching company to preach his gospel to the overworked masses. Google, of course, let’s us take the course for free. :)
Getting Things Done argues that the key to less stress is to empty your head of those to-do’s and projects and “objectify” them by putting them into an external system. To do this, GTD suggests five key steps: collect, process, organize, review, and do. It sounds simplistic, but when was the last time you actually sat down and thought about the way that you orchestrate your productivity? For me, it wasn’t recently. I had developed some kind of nebulous system throughout high school and college to make sure I stayed on task. My tools consisted of e-mail, calendar, and millions of sticky notes. My collection, processing, organizing, reviewing, and doing all took place in a single jumbled mess that — though it worked — was probably grossly inefficient.
So, the first thing I took away from GTD was that big picture: taking time to separate the steps of your self-organization and reflecting on how to make it more efficient is worthwhile.
Continue reading ‘What I Took Away From “Getting Things Done”’
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