Team Hacks

A blog about team productivity by Sandglaz


Get Rich Slowly shares a few money saving hacks by cutting costs on transportation.

You don’t need to be productive every minute of the day. Zen Habits explains why killing time ain’t such a bad thing.

How many times have you texted “can’t talk now” or “busy, will chat later” or “I hate you and you ruined my life!” Okay, perhaps that last one is only reserved for divorces and people who try to get you to change your cable plan, but chances are you’ve spent a little too much time updating people with the same dozen messages, mostly on how you’re too busy to update them. Read Gizmodo’s great article on how Apple will soon be assisting you in blowing off your friends and providing excuses like a boss.

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Happy 236th birthday, America. It’s the 4th of July. Enjoy your hotdogs, your parades, and your family-safe fireworks. Unless you live in Missouri, then forget “family-safe,” because you can set off pretty much anything with a wick in that state so long as it doesn’t contain enriched uranium.

Today is a day to take a break from the efficiency experts, the power bloggers, and the self improvement gurus, and get some sterling advice from a founding father. Let Thomas “I made your country with my awesome words” Jefferson school you on productivity with his Dozen Canons of Conduct in Life :

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Not counting graymail, spam, coupons, notifications, and other nonsense you’ve failed to parse out of your main inbox, how many minutes- on average- do you spend answering each email?

Don’t know? Let’s get started…

Step 1: Time Your Emails

No need to rush things yet. Just find out what your MPE is. Grab yourself a timer. There are plenty of online timers, but a good old fashioned stop watch works fine. Hell, time yourself with a Casio digital watch, because it may be 2012 on your iPad, but your wrist says it’s 1992.

Use that stopwatch whenever you are checking and/or answering email. Let it add up.

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Earlier this week we gave you the chance to improve your googling skills. Daniel Russel takes it a step further with an amazing lecture on advanced Google search techniques. Check out the highlights.

Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a powerful piece in The Atlantic this month on the possibilities and impossibilities of women trying to balance career, wealth, and family and the myths and expectations of how women fit into the modern work world.

How many "notifications" do you get in a day? In an hour? In a minute? GigaOM asks the question, is modern technology creating a culture of distraction?

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Martha Judelson cleans corporate housing. Every day she drives to a vast, bland plot of land 8 miles from Bob Hope airport near Burbank California. The land houses a complex of 215 small apartments full of analysts, consultants, insurance investigators, and other white collar travelers in need of a temporary home away from home. The décor bridges the gap between cozy and soulless, every unit is identical, and identically manicured before each new resident moves in. Martha does the manicuring.

When she began, her boss handed her a list of 82 tasks to complete for each apartment. Push the coat hangers to the left side of the sliding closet. Make sure the shower head isn’t set to “massage” mode. Set the TV to input 2. An excruciatingly long list of seemingly unnecessary tedium. On Martha’s first day, they even made her watch a 3 hour video of another employee performing the tasks. She does the same 82 two things all day every day. 410 tasks in 8 hours, Monday through Friday.

Worst job in the world? Not to Martha. In fact, she feels invigorated at the end of each day.

How is this possible? The answer has to do with a special part of the brain called the dorsolateral striatum and how humans program themselves to accomplish menial tasks.

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