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65 Comments
- EBFoxbat, on 10/12/2007, -3/+46I spend most of my day circumventing net filters. Get rid of them and I'll waste less time!
- squishee, on 10/12/2007, -3/+386. Reading stuff on Digg all day
- janisita, on 10/12/2007, -1/+36haha its true. if my employer implemented these things I wouldn't be messing around on digg.com all day!
- roosterjm2k2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+30I find that reading digg helps my productivity...here's why:
Digg is instant gratification. It doesnt take 30 minutes to get to the point...its like, see and interesting story...read it, reply if necessary. 5 minutes tops.
Now, for me, thats great. Because staring at code for hours (especially when things aren't working...) is tiresome...so taking those 5 minutes and redirecting my attention away from what im doing sort of...regenerates my brain power. A lot of times, I seem to be able to more quickly figure out whatever problem Im having after a quick break.
Aside from that, the others are all correct. My boss is the owner, so hes THE boss...and he works along side us, not over us...and treats us as such. Therefore, I'm more willing to go out of my way for him than for some over-the-shoulder Lumberg of a boss. - armbar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+25You should hang up a few of the Despair posters over top of them.
http://www.despair.com/ - Alfyx, on 11/07/2008, -1/+229. Goddamn TPS reports!
- c0ldfusi0n, on 10/12/2007, -1/+206. Feeling underpaid.
- NJank, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17until that 5 minutes stretches to 50...
- Hillsfar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16I agree. I know how much I make and I know how much more some of my co-workers make - just by having been there longer, not because they are more productive or know more than me. It makes me willing to go out there and find a better job - as my company isn't willing to pay me more.
Three percent annual raises are a joke. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12It used to be solitaire, but now... it's SPIDER solitaire.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12My employer fails all of these steps. We run windows xp on 800 mhz compaqs with 256 megs ram and a celeron! gasp! When you open more than 4 or 5 windows, it lags to a hault...
- armbar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11I quit my job and started working for myself because of a tangent of #4: the management wouldn't ever consider any new technologies or different ways of doing things. It was pretty much just shut up, keep your head down, and keep using SQL Server. They also thought that Microsoft has the best web server, database, and web application framework.
- Philluminati, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9I agree with this one. I spend from 9 til 10 on digg and the register.
It's important that my manager acknowledges and allows this. It's me showing my keen interest and keeping "fresh" my knowledge of new technologies. If I felt suppressed about managing my own time then I'd lose moral because I was seen as a bag of meat to be ordered around.
Anyway, I'm not and I can use digg as much as I want so I'm happy and productive. A good article. - GGzah, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8I think I could be more productive if I didn't go out drinking on Thursday nights.
Perhaps some sort of Friday morning nap policy is required? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8I've been on Digg constantly for the past few weeks while at work. I even pawn my work off on other people and say im overloaded. Then i post a comment like this.
- wallyhartshorn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9One item not mentioned in the article is interruptions. As a programmer, I can be FAR more productive when people just LEAVE ME ALONE. There's this thing called "flow" which basically means you're focused on what you're doing. When you're interrupted, it takes several minutes (or longer) to get back into the flow again. Constant little interruptions, like "can I ask you just one question" and "I need you to go to this meeting" and "I need you to do this quick little project, it should only take you a couple of hours/days/weeks" all get us out of our flow.
Being in a cubicle, with constant distractions all around, doesn't help either. - clyde2801, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Yes, but phone calls are even worse. I'd take emails over them any day.
- unknamed, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Spider solitaire is too damn hard, here's what you do:
Regular solitaire with these options: vegas style, draw three, cumulative score... and when you go down $300 Vito comes and breaks your knees. I smack my knees into the leg of the desk to complete the simulation. - jlawson1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I just glanced over this article and I can't believe that 'Internet access' isn't listed....
- fishfishfish, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Surely email is one of the greatest drains on employee productivity. I spend probably 25% of my time answering emails and answer and send probably 100+ messages every day. I guess that most people with desk-based IT/media jobs are pretty much the same, especially if they're in a public-facing role.
- akira117, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6How about getting paid ***** but you are expected to do everything and they wonder why there is such a bad turnover with new hires.
- jrolson7, on 10/12/2007, -1/+46. Hire some eye candy
- smkndrkn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4#2 should be #1 IMO. The boss or immediate supervisor is so key in the attitude of subordinates that I think it trumps all else.
My department currently is run by someone who hides in his office all day playing poker (losing his shirt) and browsing transvestite pornography. Needless to say the moral of the entire department is down and last year was probably our most unproductive in the 6 years I've been with the company.
Good times..... - jrtcs, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The sad thing about this article is the 'PLEASE DIGG THIS' at both the top and bottom.
- specz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3how about a salesman who gets no sales commission (yeah I hate my job)
- DeskFlyer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4On a related note, find a job you truly like doing no matter what the pay is. Keep seeking until you find it. You won't regret it.
- martynda, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4So that's what they call it now....
- phynodedotnet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2How about constantly yammering co-workers thinking the wall outside of my cubicle is a conference facility and I can't hear myself think because the bucketheads are discussing the ever-important subject of last night's American Idol show.
That's the number one reason. - mt066, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"85 percent of U.S. employers said they were interested in services to increase employee productivity, minimize absences and enhance the health of their employees"
Hmmm....that is probably the least shocking statistic I will see today. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"I spend most of my day circumventing net filters. Get rid of them and I'll waste less time!"
I work in the IT department at a large resort. To circumvent the net filters I have a second computer connected to the hotel's wifi network. :P - Tyr7BE, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Compile time is another one. I program in C all day, and as soon as I start a build that takes more than a few seconds, I hit digg.
- Firehed, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Not liking the article doesn't make it blogspam. If you need blogspam defined properly, just visit engadget or gizmodo, which typically offer a sentence or two summary of the original linked article, usually with a swiped picture. Basically, anything where you profit from briefly summarizing and then linking to someone else's actual article (actual analysis or response is OK though). Original content on a blog isn't spam.
- webwulf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1# 5 was the one that I thought was useful. It is not a good feeling when you think your job, which you go to every day and depend on for food, could go to a third-world country.
- FastZ, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I forwarded these to a bunch of people in my office. We suck at morale and good attitudes around here. We all hate our jobs and our supervisors pretty much are the worst possible.
- weijie90, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Hear, hear!
- unsolicited, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Quite simple. Give Stock Options to all your employees.
- 177emc2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1digging has no affect on productivity
- lovepotionno69, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@hillsfar
"Three percent annual raises are a joke."
According to the Social Security Administration, cost of living adjustment is 3.3% for 2006, so technically you got a paycut.
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/latestCOLA.html - fortezza, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Very true. Other things are being blocked from personal email and banking Web sites. If I need to send an urgent email or order an important financial transaction and cannot do it, I spend the day worrying if I can get home fast enough to do it before the deadline. Otherwise I could just do it and get back to work, completely focused.
- insovietrussia, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Then back date em'
- osofast, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yea, I agree. Recent research by Gayle Porter agrees with this strategy.
- starguy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1My luddite rant: Meet one of the greatest lies of the 21st century: computers make you more productive.
On the contrary, nothing absolutely destroys productivity like a computer. Computers are nothing but televisions with keyboards attached to them. That is what the first consumer 8bits were, and they were totally useless. They were snake oil toys. Commodore, Radio Shack, Apple, IBM... were essentially crack peddlers. They sold us a bunch of silicon snake oil now worthless crack. You may now call the televisions they are attached to monitors, or LCDs, but its still the same thing. A crack addiction staring at a television fascinated with the ablity to move pixels and bits around in a nonexistant virtual world.
Would you pay an employee to come to work and stare at a television 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? Exactly. I didn't think so.
I've found, when I switch off all the computes, cover them up, and swear them off, something magical happens. All of a sudden, I become productive again. I clean up the house. I work on the car. I fix a leak in the roof. I wash some clothes. I go out and buy groceries. I pay some bills. I go outside and do some yardwork. Try it. Swear off computers for a week, force yourself, and watch how suddenly a vacuum appears once the computer is removed, and how bored you become (embrace the boredom, its a good thing) without the computer to stare at all day, and boom! you go looking for "other" more constructive thigns to do.
In 20 years of evolution, computers still can only really be used to do two things: to simulate things, and as communication tools. And for both, there alternatives that work just as well that don't involve using computers at all. Get rid of all the computers in your business, and your employees will start to be productive "in the real world". Most of what is supposedly done with computers, can be done just as well or better with pen and paper, letter and envelope, blackboard and chalk, stick drawn in the sand even.
Just about everything you can argue that computers can do more effiecient or better, and save you time, ends up costing you far much time and money on the back end somewhere else. All that time you spend reformating the harddrive, reinstalling OSs, configuring the system, upgrading the systems, junking the systems, crashing the systems, over and over (remember all those lovely blue screens of death and Apple bombs you've endured? and the slow reboots)... it all subtracts overwhelmingly from the fact you were able to use some copy of MacDraw Pro once to draft a little architectural plan you did in half the time than over paper. Or that one time you actually were being productive and wrote a termpaper in a wordprocessor, which saved you time over using a clunky typewriter. Those costs on the back end destroy all gains on the front end... its just shifting and expanding the cost in time to somewhere else, not eliminating it.
I'm not even going to start in on the environmental costs... but lets just say, instead of trying to build these retarded $100 laptops for African chidlren, or put computers in schools, what you need to be doing with this money is buying these kids some pen and paper, and some books. $100 worth of pens and paper will be a thosand times more durable and useful to them... information storage on them has an infinate life span, no batteries are required, no OS to crash, no harddrives to fail, instantly on and instantly off, random access. You can use it to store any sort of information, from data to writing to editing to graphics. - sevenofnine, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0One, if you want your people to use the internet for business, put in a proxy. Make them authenticate to get out the internet. Once it becomes painfully obvious that you can see what they're doing, it will magically become work related and those visits to myspace and ebay will diminish drastically. The remainder of them you can deal with via HR. Furthermore, not every single employee needs to have access to the internet. Restrict it to those who need it. The rest can deal with people via email.
Two, quit fighting the IM battle. Set up a corporate IM and require everyone to use it. No more AOL, Yahoo, MSN, etc. It stops them from chatting with their friends and gets them chatting with their co-workers and customers.
Three, centralize your software, antivirus, antispyware, and patch management. Keeping your machines, scanned, patched, and up to date will go a long way to preventing the meltdowns mentioned by the Luddite above. I deal with all kinds of very nasty software - viruses, trojans, etc. - in my day job. I've got appropriate countermeasures on my workstation and it's been rebuilt once in the last 2 years and that was because the motherboard failed.
Four - I have to agree with the statement about appropriate technology. I'm not saying that everyone in your organization needs a laptop and blackberry. Your janitor certainly doesn't. Your field service guy probably does. There's a lot of technology out there and finding the right things takes skill and experience. It's not something you get from some guy in India for $8. Which brings me to my next rant.
Five - the attitudet of upper management toward the rank and file has to change. The "little people" are not some nameless faceless entity to screw over so that upper management can hand themselves a big bonus. American Airlines is finding this coming home to roost. The airline was on the brink of bankruptcy. The rank and file took several large pay cuts so that the airline could survive. Now that the airline is profitable again, they're not getting anything back from their loyalty but the upper management is getting $170 in bonuses. Southwest, which has always been profitable, has been known to have managers take a pay cut in order to keep from laying anyone off. Southwest also has very good relations with all of its employees, whereas American Airlines has constant difficult relations with theirs. Dell is another case of this. The directors and above are getting bonuses despite the poor performance of the company while the rank and file get nada. Don't think it's a problem - how about some quotes from the rank & file themselves....
Here's one from HP that appeared in a WSJ article - "CEO Carly Fiorina couldn't even get a majority of H-P employees to vote their shares for this merger, and now she expects we'll help her pull these two companies together while she cuts another 10,000 jobs? Fat chance" Or how about Nortel - "It's unconscionable to me that Nortel executives are receiving bonuses when 50,000 people have lost their jobs. They have run the company into the ground." Or the venerable AT&T - "Directions to the Web site for AT&T Concerned Employees, an organization formed by AT&T workers to fight the forced conversion of their pensions to a cash-balance plan that slashed the benefits of senior workers who had been at the company for 15 years or more. (Congress recently began hearings on cash-balance plans after a Department of Labor Inspector General report showed that almost 25% of such plans shortchanged workers who left the company before normal retirement age by as much as $100,000 each.) "
Now if you do things like this to your employees, is it any wonder that they change jobs? sell your proprietary information? subert your company in subtle ways? don't do their best work every day? - alpinweiss88, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Management is such a huge part of overall performance. i used to work where they adopted technology, and it did make us more productive. We all had dual flat-panels (at least 19"). It really DOES improve your productivity. However, the management there was a bunch of lying used-car salesmen. They would promise all kinds of things, like annual performance reviews, bonuses, etc. etc. Then they would never come through on them. They lied continuously, which severely undermined their authority. If someone was fired, they would lie about the reasons to make themselves look better. They would lie to clients, promise them things that we knew we couldn't deliver. They would favor certain people in the company, long-time buddies that they hired. They were horrible at communication, often-times you could be assigned something in meeting you didn't even attend, and it was YOUR responsibility to find that out.
Of course, you realize all these things after you leave - while you are there, you just kind of accept them. But it seriously impacts your morale, even if you don't realize it. We were often told that if we weren't happy, it was our fault and maybe we didn't belong there. If you find yourself in a company like this, do yourself a favor and get out as quickly as possible. There are lots of things that are wrong with most companies, but if bad management is one of them, there really isn't much you can do about it. - bwhite, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Or just take it home and work on your side projects
- giddeon, on 11/12/2008, -0/+0In our company it runs a employee monitoring software (named Cyclope) which monitors all teh activities. Fisrt of all I was thinking that this is a bad idea because ... many reasons. But at some point the manager called me and told me that from the statistics that the application provided - he knows that I am working hard (visual studion - like 7 h per day plus reaserch on the Internet) and that is very good. This application has became an instrument for tracking the productivity and if you know that you are monitored you will try harder :) .. I think
- sannm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1you forgot your /sarcasm tag
- DeskFlyer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1@ specz
Um, not sure if I understand you there.
But I find that most people (namely guys, who usually support the family they create) need high paying jobs because they can't keep their ***** in their pants.
Well, boo-farking-hoo for you. I'm single, child free, and I am damn proud it. If you can't support your fleet of children that pop out of your g/f's pussy, it is your own damn fault. Sorry. - thunderFoots, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Fitter, Happier, More productive...
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