Minimalism at Workplace

Minimalism is simple, reduce your stressors by eliminating them. Minimalism will relax you, it will allow you to focus on the essentials.

- Clean your desk.
- When conveying your ideas do not exceed a single A4 page.
- Never organise a meeting longer than one hour. If you think one hour is enough, ask yourself why not half-an-hour?
- Never spend more than 15 minutes to draw a design diagram.
- Never spend more than 30 minutes on a new design wiki page.
- Favour talk to IM, IM to email.
- If you have to, never write long emails, not longer than three paragraphs.
- In your written communications use short sentences;

• Avoid jargon.
• At most two sentences per paragraph.
• Leave an empty line between paragraphs.
• Follow the two-phase structure:

• Background
•   Question or Solution

- Never broadcast emails to unrelated employees.
- Never Reply All to an email.
- Let your actions make you, not your talk.
- Talk less, tell more, listen more.
- Treat everybody equal.

Timeful

Managing work schedules is a crucial element of a modern workplace. For most, work days are fragmented in hourly, sometimes half-hourly time slots.

We use tools such as Outlook to book meetings and events. These tools are great, however they have some limitations. They lack intelligence and flexibility to help us fill gaps with sensible choices, and they don’t work well with our private activities outside work.

What if we have a smart app on our phone, that will merge Outlook calendar with our private organiser, and help us forming habits, manage our to do lists, and other events effortlessly, in addition to syncing with work schedules.

I give you Timeful, a smart time management app that does all that.

Timeful has AI (Artificial Intelligence) engine to track your habits. Its brilliance comes from the fact that it learns to work with you and your roughly defined schedules.

Say you want to form a new habit. Lets say you want to do Yoga, 3 times a week, mostly in the evenings, and at noon. Timeful is OK with rough schedules, it understands habit forming is hard, therefore it gives you flexibility to fit them into your existing schedule. When its sees a fit Timeful fills it with an activity you nominated. You either go for it, defer it or move it to another time slot with a simple gesture.

Timeful has a seamless, simple and a very easy to use interface. Adding a new to do item, a new habit, or scheduling an event is a breeze. Moving an item into a different time slot or deferring  is equally easy.

As time slots are fragmented, we ended up having diverse activities in shorter attention spans. This is a fact of 21st  century. Good or bad we have to live with it and we need ways to deal with it. Timeful comes handy with its AI, and friendly manners to help us go through our busy life style. It turns hectic into sensible.

Timeful

Compartments

Seek for compartments in design and in life.

Principles to adhere:

•  Each compartment needs to be identifiable, movable, self contained, and elegantly handled.
•  Attend, handle and enjoy each compartment in isolation.
•  Avoid clutter, inter-dependencies and dominating compartments.
•  Regularly visit, evaluate, re-order, downsize and clean up your compartments.
•  Remove the compartments that create too much stress on you.
• If the time allocated is up and it is obvious that you are not going to make it, reschedule and move to another compartment.

These principles apply to below and many other cases:

•  Your best friend
•  Your job 
•  Furniture
•  Your child's issues
•  Management of your money
•  Your garden
•  Friends   
•  Software, regardless of you design them or you use them
•  Book reading
•  Google+ surfing
•  Broken things, accidents, health (car, refrigerator, plumbing, illness and so on)  
•  etc.

Craftsmanship

This video shows craftspeople creating hand made parts for an iconic brand Leica.



Hand-made products are still thriving in Italian, Swiss, German and Danish workshops and in other countries throughout Europe.

Yes they are in small numbers and they are mostly for wealthy who can afford them.

But my point today is not to open a lengthy discussion about economic crisis, globalization, far-eastern sweatshops or wealth distribution. Plenty of that stuff is widely covered in media.

I would like to talk about something related to being a human.

When you watch the video you will notice something interesting. There is no music. There are sounds of hand making process and background noise of the workshop. There is no rush. There is buzz.

I could almost feel the cool sensation of creating something with your hands. An intimate bond is woven between you, the object you are bringing into life and the fortunate future owner.

Creating hand-made is a happy process under right conditions. It brings calmness, human touch and humanly sensations into air.

I would like to see hand-made arts and craftsmanship survive. There are indications that they may in fact. So long as Europe sticks to its centuries old brand names and keep authenticity they may hold on in niche markets. As a result we may be able to keep some of those beautiful art forms, craftsmanship and human experience for decades to come.

Lonely tunes

Psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkle argues;

“We all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits.”

Online personas do not reflect our true self. They are edited, groomed, reshaped version of our identities.

In real life we have accents, tones, gestures, we say silly or embarrassing things, we get emotional, we can be boring, even irritating at times.

But only by making a real and intimate conversation with someone we may discover what we are seeking about ourselves or we may be able to help others to solve their issues.

Turkle also makes a distinction between ”being alone” (a necessity for reflection) and ”being lonely” (an undesirable state of mind):

“If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they're only going to know how to be lonely.”

Excessive social networking does not cure loneliness. On the contrary by not letting ourselves to be alone we aggravate our loneliness, and we may gradually loose our ability to connect with ourselves, our desires and wisdom we once were seeking.

www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together.html

Focus

I know cliché it may sound, but this book changed my life:

Focus -a simplicity manifesto in the age of distraction- by Leo Babauta

Before I started to read Focus, I already became close to a breaking point due to my bad online habits I developed over the last few years.

I let information overload littering my consciousness like there is no end. I have it all at home, Facebook, Google Reader, Google Buzz, Twitter, Gmail, Delicious, LinkedIn, hundreds of friends, tweets, ‘Like’s, you name it.

To make things worse I try to catch up with every other progressive agenda that I feel passionate about, be it atheism, teaching evolution, gender equality, global peace, human rights, democracy and so on.

I maintain two blogs, Negative Matter and Evrim Olgusu (Turkish).

At work things are not any better. Let me say though, the company I work for is one of the best organisations in the IT industry in terms of work practices. I have a very reasonable workload and stress free job. Yet being my own enemy I manage to create stress for myself out of nothing, thanks largely to my lack of awareness about ill effects of distractions.

The Focus book will convince you how much, without being aware, we enslave ourselves to information overload, how distractions become addictions, and how much unnecessary stress they create on us. Then it will teach you techniques to eliminate the problem and find your own rhythm.

Last week I started to apply some of the techniques I learned, and I already witnessed substantial benefits. Currently I am still experimenting with different methods.

In a nutshell the message is:

"Divide work/hobbies -things that require focus-, and distractions in separate time-slots, both at work and in your private life, and simplify your life by getting rid of the stuff you don't need".

The crucial point is to deal with disruptions in predefined timeslots. This may at first seem to be a contradiction, as by definition distractions happen unplanned. So they seem.

The idea here is not to get rid of distractions. In fact, as Babauta states, at times we need distractions, to prioritise our work, and relax stress caused by probable bottlenecks in our focused work.

The key idea is to condense distractions and focused work in separate timeslots.

Here are some simple steps I took:

1. I disconnected from Facebook.
2. I reduced Google Reader RSS feeds by 90%.
3. I changed my browser’s home page from Gmail to plain Google search page (not iGoogle).
4. I close excessive tabs opened in my browser.

At work:

1. I clean up my desk clutter, and don’t let clutter to cumulate. No papers, no sticky pads, no objects between my PC monitor and me. I have just my teacup.
2. I have one small pile of paper to the left of my direction (not directly visible). The pile is neat –no paper is hanging- and I regularly reduce it.
3. I have one plain A4 page hung on the empty panel to the right of my direction. On it there is a small list of items I intend to finish during the day. This page changes every morning. There is nothing else hung on panels I am facing.
4. I check my email in predefined timeslots. At the moment I am trying this schedule: 9am, 11am, 2pm, 4pm. At these times I check my email, and respond to messages. I try to remain within 15-20 minutes boundary each time.
5. In the development environment I use –Microsoft Visual Studio-, I pay attention to workspace clutter and frequently close files I no longer need.
6. Similarly I clean up my Windows desktop. I have no shortcuts, folders on my desktop wall, which are not absolutely necessary.

Well it works. It works beautifully. I cannot tell you how much my productivity and quality of work I produce increased at work and at home.

In incoming days I will be experimenting with different techniques and I will let you know how I proceed. Until then bye.

For more information on Focus, the book, see:

http://zenhabits.net/focus-book/