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productivity

6 January 2017

Posted on January 6, 2017 Leave a Comment

It’s New Year’s resolutions season. Increasing productivity remains on my worklist. Many of you wrote last year after I shared tips to deal with two major distractions: meetings and emails. On the latter, I found more good stuff in Jocelyn Glei’s Unsubscribe: How to kill email anxiety, avoid distractions, and get real work done. It starts with facts that make readers question their habits: we spend 28% of our time on email, checking it 74 times and processing 122 messages every day.  It reminds us of what email is good for (eg scheduling) and not (eg making decisions involving lots of people). It flags an important bias: people are predisposed to perceive email messages negatively. It gives a check list to cut back on email mania: outline professional goals, define a daily routine, and set expectations. The number one tip is to move to batch processing of emails, 2 or 3 times a day. Batchers are more productive and less stressed. While the book focuses on productivity, it discusses spillovers on wellbeing and is published in times of growing support for the right to disconnect.
Should we not give up email altogether? Some argue that email is here to stay in our type of business because of its many other functions, like storage and backup. But with recurrent predictions about the death of email, the growing use of instant messaging in the workplace, and my teenage daughter’s constant reminder that email is for old people, I might create some space to think about a post-email UN in 2017.

I enjoyed listening to Nesta’s Geoff Mulgan opening the 2016 ESPAS conference with “What make a prosperous society in the 21st century?”. He uses Hegel’s dialectic thinking (history moves from thesis to anti-thesis to new synthesis) to analyze the current context and the new possibilities it offers.  The thesis was an open, democratic, technology-optimistic model. We are now witnessing the dark pessimistic anti-thesis. So Mulgan calls for new syntheses that go beyond nostalgic repackagings of the old thesis. His own proposal includes: education models that prepare young people for the future and nurture their agency; public services linked to a new kind of engagement with active citizens; iterative democratic models; and participatory budgeting. This is an energizing perspective but I am left thinking: how does that participatory model work for those who are not connected, engaged, or even visible?

My graph this week is from the WEF’s “Renewable Infrastructure Investment Handbook: A Guide for Institutional Investors”. It shows that solar and wind are now cheaper than coal or natural gas. 30 countries have already reached “grid parity” (ie providing energy from renewable sources costs as much as traditional power grid generation) without subsidies. And 2/3 of the world countries will get there in the next two years.

 

My quote this week is from Thomas Piketty’s “Passing of Anthony B. Atkinson”: “During the past half-century, in defiance of prevailing trends, [Atkinson] placed the question of inequality at the center of his work while demonstrating that economics is first and foremost a social and moral science.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: book review, energy, governance, inequality, productivity, workplace

15 January 2016

Posted on January 15, 2016 Leave a Comment

New Year resolutions are very personal. But discussions with colleagues have proven useful in refining mine in the past. So let me share some on my work list. For the past years, they’ve focused on improving productivity. The main productivity disturbances at my end come from emails and meetings. They suck up time and maintain a reactive mode. For email management, Owen Barder’s “Take control of your email in 2013” has been a super useful guide. It takes time to set up the whole triage system, and then some willingness to turn off Outlook several times a day, but it is worth the investment. For optimizing the work day, I borrowed a lot from Shane Parrish’ ”How to be insanely more productive” seminar. Four main tips: (i) plan creative work in the morning, keep reactive work for the afternoon [yes, that means don’t start the day with the email backlog]; (ii) work in chunks, schedule them in your calendar, and try to apply the no-email/no-meeting rule to at least one time-period; (iii) before leaving the office, write down the 2-3 key deliverables for the next day; and (iv) “say no” [probably the hardest part]. At a less mundane level, I have enjoyed Maria Popova’s “16 elevating resolutions for 2016 inspired by some of humanity’s greatest minds”, even though her selection suffers a serious Western bias.

The 2016 World Development Report “Digital dividends” is out. I only read the 45-page executive summary but the message is clear: despite the rapid spread of the internet and mobile phones, and the many individual success stories, digital technologies have not delivered the expected positive development outcomes in particular for the poorest. Where positive business environments, good education systems and accountable institutions are present, digital technologies can help enhance growth and foster inclusion and innovation. Where this “analog foundation” is absent, they won’t and can even exacerbate inequalities. This aligns with previous arguments made about technology acting as an amplifier of pre-existing good or bad policies. So most recommendations proposed by the World Bank are not technology-specific, they are about providing some development basics.

My graph this week is from the World Economic Forum’s “Global Risks Report 2016”. It shows that the top estimated risks this year are environment- and migration-related. Inequalities which were at the top of the WEF list in previous years do not feature prominently this time around.

 

 

My quote of the week is from George Lucas in a recent Charlie Rose interview [9’02”]:
Rose: “Because you have worn all these hats: film-maker, director, story-teller, writer, technological innovator, what do you want the first line of your obituary to say?”
Lucas: “That I was a great dad.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: digital, inequality, productivity, workplace

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