In congratulations to vael, with his new office job, I present a fifteen minute video about why people can’t get work done at work - mainly because they’re interrupted by managers, meetings, and other employees, all of which are things they can’t avoid.

        Given that the rest of us do most (if not all) of our work in isolation, within reach of a computer, the distractions we face are voluntary (or perhaps compulsive). We may get no work done because we check our e-mail, facebook, browser based games, etc. every fifteen minutes. He proposes that we go through stages of work, similar to stages of sleep (which you should already know about), and that we need long stretches of uninterrupted time to properly get anything done. Also like stages of sleep, there may be natural lulls in our productivity, at which point we can check our e-mail without any harm.

        That’s the video in a nutshell, but I thought it was worth posting anyway. I dearly love the two three hour breaks I have on tuesdays and thursdays - I can sit down and code or study and just get things done. On mondays and wednesdays, I have two 1.5 hour breaks, which are in no way equivalent to one of my three hour breaks. It helps to remove distractions by turning off my wireless card, but I have to spend 5-10 minutes walking to my next class, another few minutes getting set up, etc. It all adds up.

——————————————————————

        Also pretty good is Tom Chatfield’s 7 Ways Games Reward the Brain. I love the idea of using this kind of info to “game” people into being more productive, healthy, efficient, or… well, better at everything really.

—————————————————————–

        Remember BumpTop? I was organizing my desktop the other day when I felt like Windows 7 was supposed to have some feature where you put things into a “pile” instead of a folder, and then I was like OMG BUMPTOP. I found a copy (which is theoretically alright because they were giving it away before taking it off the site) so I’m going to try it out. You can probably find it yourself if you like, but I can get it to you if you’re interested.