Productivity porn It’s like a finger pointing at the moon. Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all of the heavenly glory!— Bruce Lee. The internet is full of productivity tips and techniques, more accurately known as productivity porn. And I plead guilty. I’ve learned a few things the hard way that are not often mentioned. If you really deeply care about something, you will do it. So what do you need a system for? Do not confuse activity for progress. How To: Mapping Your Value Stream When we build our kanban – whether for ourselves or for a team – we first need to build a value stream. A value stream is simply a list of the steps you take to create value. When we build a kanban, work flows along the value stream and this visualizes our flow. Before We Begin There are some quick tips about a value stream. It should match reality as closely as possible.It should be only as detailed as necessary to see and understand your work flow.As your understanding and contexts change, your value stream will also change. These three tips are telling. The Beginning: Start with the Ends in Mind What is it you are doing? In a meeting you may be: fully discussing a topiccoming up with action itemsplanning a future set of tasks At home you might be: delegating choresplanning a vacationbuilding a deck During the workday you might be: creating documentsmanaging staffbuilding a section of an airplane All nine of these might have very different end-states. Next Step: Fill in the Blanks 1. 2. 3. 4Share
Performance Artist Kalup Linzy and the Art of Being a Character Kirsten Luce for The New York Times The performance artist Kalup Linzy at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery. His animation, back left, was on display. Amid the swans nervously clutching a glass of white wine was the show’s unlikeliest darling, a black Southern-inflected, gender-bending, genre-defying video-and-performance artist named Kalup Linzy. Instead of the bad wigs or skimpy dresses that his characters are known for, Mr. Linzy looked positively demure in a beige henley T-shirt and sneakers. “I bought these on clearance at a department store in Union Square,” Mr. It was hard to know if Mr. The characters, many played by Mr. “He’s a multifaceted artist who’s become a recognizable figure on the contemporary New York art scene in only a few years,” said Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA PS1 in Queens, which has given Mr. Mr. As his fame rose, so did the company he kept. The two met in 2009 at , at a party honoring Mr. It was one of the oddest art pairings in recent memory.
Developing Razor Sharp Focus with Zen Habits Blogger, Leo Babauta If you’ve just logged into Facebook or your email for the 10th time today or find yourself thinking in Facebook statuses throughout the day, it may be time to read Leo Babauta’s eBook “Focus: A simplicity manifesto in the age of distraction”. This free eBook contains dozens of practical suggestions to help you enjoy life more, enhance your creativity and get things done. If there ever was an equivalent of steroids for focus, this book is it – it’s a great tool to help anyone develop razor sharp focus and churn out quality work. After reading this book, I made a number of changes that dramatically sharpened my focus. I have summarised a number of the strategies in the mind map below. Create Focus Rituals/Habits: Babauta defines a ritual as a set of actions you repeat habitually. He argues that rituals can help us to get into a focused mindset and suggests a number of rituals for the morning, before you begin your work, to help you refocus on your work and for the end of the day.
Practice your personal Kaizen A fine article. But as a resident of Japan who's spent over half his life speaking Japanese, let me take this chance to address one common myth. "Kaizen" in Japanese does NOT mean "continual improvement", or have any mystical managerial significance. It's a mundane, generic word meaning "improvement" - any improvement, continual or not. (An aside: Leading Japanese companies like Toyota make continual improvement a core practice. Toyota and some of its contemporaries have indeed developed advanced, powerful methods for continuous operational improvement, within the context of their industries. Of course, if modern management gurus in the US (or wherever) want to latch on to the word "kaizen" as the new name for "continuous improvement", they're welcome to do so; words gain new meanings all the time.
Building Your First Personal Kanban The basic kanban: Waiting, Working, Done A quick trip through personal kanban design patterns demonstrates how they can be created using any number of materials. This tutorial illustrates how to build the most common personal kanban. Step One: Establish Your Value Stream Value Stream (v l y str m): The flow of work from the moment you start to when it is finished. Step Two: Establish Your Backlog Backlog (b kl g , -lôg ): The work you haven’t done yet. Step Three: Establish Your WIP Limit WIP (hw p, w p): Work in Progress Limit – The amount of work you can handle at one time. “Pull” tasks from one kanban stage to the next Step Four: Begin to Pull Pull (p l): To take completed work from one stage of the value stream and pull it into the next. Beyond Step Four: Prioritize, Refine, and Reduce Past step four, it’s all about prioritization of work, refinement of the value stream, and reduction of waste.
The Mini Maggie System -- Honey, I shrunk the speakers! Photo Credit: Magnapan It's been rumored about for ages, played at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas a couple of years ago, but sometime in September Magnepan will begin shipping the Mini Maggie System ($1,495). It's a desktop speaker system, albeit one designed to satisfy the most demanding audiophile tastes. I visited the Magnepan factory in White Bear Lake, Minnesota in late July to spend some quality time with the Mini Maggies. The Magnapan 3.7 speaker. Magnepan was founded in the late 1960s, making it one of America's oldest high-end speaker companies. Photo Credit: Steve Guttenberg Wendell had the Mini Maggie System setup with a modified Denon DVD 3910 SACD/DVD-Audio player, Audio Research LS-1 line stage preamp, and a Threshold S/550 power amp. The Mini may be a scaled down 3.7, but it actually sounds better than a 3.7 in a number of ways. The Mini-Maggie System is a three-piece affair; it comes with two satellite speakers and a DWM-Maggie woofer panel.
Top 10 Ways to Declutter Your Digital Life, 2010 Edition After I built the new computer last weekend I decided to take the larger of the two hard drives out of the old one to put in an external enclosure for backup purposes. This forced me to take a good look at what was on that drive. No, I did not need a backup of my entire iTunes music collection from a year and a half ago, and duplicate backups of my photos. There was also a huge mass of accumulated WordPress files of various kinds (plugins, themes, old versions of WordPress) that I mostly did not need to keep around. So last night I went through folder by folder and deleted the stuff I didn't need to keep and zipped up the rest. I do still need to declutter the top of my desk, which is turning into tchotchke heaven.
15 Bad Habits Which Always Destroy Your Productivity Do you feel as if your productivity levels are at an all time low? Do you find it more and more difficult to complete work in a timely, and efficient fashion? You might be sabotaging your productivity without even realizing it. Avoid these 15 bad habits and you’ll give your productivity a much-needed boost! 1. You take too much time to complete a simple task. Taking six hours to write a simple, one-page e-mail really isn’t the best use of your time. 2. There will be times when you just can’t complete your work in a timely fashion. 3. Do you stare at your schedule, thinking about how best to use every last minute of your day? 4. Quick, when was the last time you left your desk for a break? 5. You need food – and water – to survive. 6. Is there an app on your phone, tablet or computer that you absolutely despise? 7. When’s the perfect moment to start planning your dream vacation, clean out your closet or look for that new job? 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
Theory The self-determination continuum described in Deci & Ryan's (1985, 1991) organismic integration theory represents differences in the ways in which people's behaviour can be regulated and how these differences are experienced. The following fictitious mini-biographies illustrate these different forms of behavioural regulation in exercise contexts. June June is a charity worker. She has not taken any regular exercise since leaving school and has unhappy memories of cold, wet and windy days on the school playing field being yelled at by her PE teacher. Paul Paul is a trainee paramedic who has just reluctantly signed up at his local gym. Bill Bill is a civil engineer in his fifties. Alan Alan had rather a hard time socially as a child and adolescent. Liz Liz is a senior executive in a leading City finance house. Sandra Sandra used to be a teacher but retrained a few years ago as a fitness instructor. John John is a builder. Commentary on the biographies The boundary between intrinsic and extrinsic
How many Americans die from racial segregation? About 176,000 a year. | [ EpiAnalysis ] We often hear that poverty and inequality contribute to poor health, but how much difference do they actually make? More than smoking? Less than fast food? Over the past few weeks, three landmark papers have emerged that actually quantify how much social factors affect the health of Americans. The mechanisms explaining why neighborhood social factors contribute to ill health are often called “complex and difficult to individually isolate”; how can we truly tell that a heart attack resulted from being pushed out to a semi-industrial neighborhood without access to a doctor or a quality grocery store? Calculating the PAF In 1993, two researchers at the U.S. A few weeks ago, researchers at Columbia University zoomed out further: they recognized that alcohol, tobacco, and similar social pathologies are strongly related to the types of neighborhoods and families that people live around. How does that compute in the grand scheme of things? Calculating the bottom line Seems obvious, no?
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