Career

How to Do What You Love. January 2006 To do something well you have to like it.

That idea is not exactly novel. The Origin of the 8-Hour Work Day and Why We Should Rethink It. 9.3K Flares Filament.io 9.3K Flares × One of the most unchanged elements of our life today is our optimal work time or how long we should work – generally, every person I’ve spoken to quotes me something close to 8 hours a day.

And data seems to confirm that: The average American works 8.8 hours every day. At least, those are the official statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: This Is What It Looks Like When You Realize How Toxic Your Job Is and You Do Something About It. Deciding to Offer Web Design in a Gift Economy Changed My Life.

Here’s How. Top 10 Steps to Successful Goals. 14 Aug 2010 "There is no such thing as a wish without the power to make it come true.

10 Steps to Setting SMART Objectives. SMART Goals & Objectives. SMART Goals & Objectives. Profile on TED.com. NYT and WSJ Bestselling Author of Drive. Tompeters! RIP FedEx Day, Meet [Your idea here] Day. Umm, so what's a ShipIt?

Anything can be a ShipIt. We see everything from practical to inspiring, simple to insane, technical to non-technical. JIRA Service Desk Andreas, Nick, Mike, Ross, and Scott spent 24 hours hacking together a simpler portal to create JIRA issues. Say hello to JIRA Service Desk. Better bulbs Luke and Jeffy replaced all the hot, energy ineffecient light bulbs in the "phone booth" rooms. Extermination "I hate you IE8, I hate you IE8, I hate you IE8… Oh. DIY video studio Mark, Sam, & Jamey wanted more videos in our blogs & pages. Faster JIRA "Dear Jonathon and Matt, thanks for making my pages load faster. Black ops Ricky, Sonia, and Manesh made something so cool we can't even tell you about it yet. Better brew Jonathon makes awesome homebrew and wants to share it.

Infinite quarters Ever dream of having an infinite stack of quarters at the arcade? Nintendo Asks Atlassian for Some Innovation Help. By Sarah Lacy On March 20, 2012 For an enterprise software company Atlassian does some, let’s say, unconventional things.

The first time I met Atlassian President Jay Simons he was wearing full drag. This wasn’t in a club on a Saturday night, mind you. It was in the middle of the work day in a coffee shop. I was having coffee with one of Atlassian’s VCs, Rich Wong of Accel Partner. Slightly less strange is a tradition called “FedEx days.” One of them lead to a product called Bonfire; which generates more than $1 million a year in annual revenues for Atlassian. Plenty of companies offer bonuses if an engineer comes up with something cool, but Atlassian’s founders believed that impressing your colleagues and challenging yourself is a bigger motivator than a cash prize. It has worked so well that Dan Pink wrote it up in his book Drive, and that prompted some other companies to do their own FedEx days. What it takes to do new things at work, overnight. By Polly LaBarre, contributor (TheMIX) -- What leader today doesn't want more innovation?

Yet, producing more (of anything) inside an organization generally leads to more process, which smothers individual creativity and all-too-often kills organizational innovation. Innovation isn't about structuring a process to lead to an outcome so much as it's about creating space -- both elbow room, the space to roam free of bureaucratic rules and red tape, and head room, the freedom to see differently, think wildly, and aim higher. The leaders who generate more creative energy and innovation are always wrestling with the question: How do we design in more slack? It's the Culture, Stupid! How Atlassian maintains an open Information Culture. @VC Arun, I hope I can answer some of your questions...

First and foremost, how does a company deal with the challenge of having an "open" culture, with transparency of (sensitive) information, and employees who leave the company at various stages? The tone of your question suggests you come from a culture where the default is "closed" information. Atlassian's Big Experiment with Performance Reviews. 1.

Rip apart the traditional performance review We've replaced the traditional performance review structure with a more lightweight, continuous model. 2. Stop paying individual performance bonuses. Ratings Are Out. It's almost impossible to talk meaningfully about someone's performance as a whole ("Nicola, I thought you did great last year").

So instead most performance conversations are broken down into chunks & at CSB we call these chunks factors. For example a factor might be a hard performance metric, like sales, or a softer behavior, like teamwork. People typically get a rating on each factor, and there are a million different types of rating scales, which many smart people have put lots of effort into designing. But for the purposes of this coaching idea the actual rating scale is, er... kind of irrelevant. Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE)