Posts with keyword: productivity

8 entries

O-Ring Theory of Production

Mon Mar 7 08:50:00 2016

Fascinating look at the way the multiplicative nature of quality in complex tasks leads to exponential effects in overall productivity. The video is about 20 minutes long.
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Productivity and The Distribution of Wealth

Sat Nov 12 14:37:00 2011

Wealth concentration is structural and computers have led to and sped it up.
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Bigger Monitors Boost Productivity

Wed Mar 12 18:53:00 2008

An article in the Wall Street Journal's Business Technology blog reports on research that James Anderson conducted for NEC. The research found: someone using a larger monitor could save 2.5 hours a day. But James Anderson, the professor in charge of the study, tells the Business Technology Blog to take that result with a grain of salt: It assumes that someone will work non-stop for eight hours, which no one will, and that the tasks they perform will all benefit from a larger screen, which isn't always the case. But things like moving data between files are ideally suited
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Leopard and Mail

Mon Nov 19 11:01:00 2007

I was forced to upgrade to Leopard last week by a Tiger update gone bad. I'm not convinced I can blame Apple--I've updated my machine hundreds of times before with nary a fault and I was, without thinking about what was going on, installing a monitor and plugging and unplugging USB devices while the update was underway. I might have messed something up. In any event, I had a problem that I couldn't find enough information to fix (something to do with a file locking problem in the IPv6 code, but I couldn't figure out the file name). Reinstalling
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My HTML Mode for Emacs

Fri Oct 20 14:18:00 2006

Some people have asked what HTML mode I finally settled on. I'm using a customized version of Daniel Pfeiffer's adaptation of James Clark's sgml-mode. Yeah, there's lots of SGML stuff that I don't use, but it has a set of HTML keybindings and is easy to add things to. For example, here's my code for inserting an image from Amazon: (define-skeleton amazon-image "HTML image tag for an Amazon book" "ASIN: " '(setq input "") "<a href=\\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/" str "/windleyofente-20\\"> <img src=\\"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/" str ".01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg\\" border=\\"0\\" align=\\"right\\" hspace=\\"5\\" vspace=\\"5\\" /></a>" ) You can do much more complicated things. For example, I like
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When You Pick Your Tools, Pick Those That Can Build Tools

Wed Oct 18 10:17:00 2006

This morning I was listening to Karl Fugel talk about tools developers need and thought about Doug Kaye. Here's why... Yesterday Doug sent out a note to a few friends asking what editor they used to writing code on OS X. I use emacs. not only do I use emacs, but I thrill to emacs for one simple reason: it's infinitely malleable. It can be made to do almost anything and has. I use it for just about everything I do. Programmers should be tool builders. If you're not building tools to make your life easier, you're wasting time.
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Building Tools for Personal Productivity

Wed Jul 12 11:55:00 2006

Peter Bowen wrote about system administration and procrastination. His particular problem was with Nagios, but we've all been there from time to time. When I became Executive Producer of IT Conversations I tried to spend the time necessary to build tools to help me automate the work wherever possible. For example, the newsletter that goes out each week is mostly generated from RSS feeds using a MovableType template and then has the ratings integrated using a Perl script. Took me an hour or two to put together but it saves me precious minutes each week when I create the
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Mark Hurst on Email Productivity (ETech 2006)

Thu Mar 9 13:19:00 2006

Mark Hurst, the creator of GoodExperience.com and ThisIsBroken is speaking on Bit Literacy: A Strategy for Productivity in Your Bit-Drenched Life. Here's what bit literacy means. Mark goes specifically to email to bring the conversation down to nuts and bolts. Mark recommends a rule of getting your inbox count to zero at least once every business day. Here's the method: Find the very most important email in the inbox. Mark believes these are personal emails from family and friends. Spend time reading them and processing them (reply, print, file) and then delete them. Go to the least important messages
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