Category:Career

My wife and I (and our Chihuahua and my turtle) moved to Los Angeles on 1 April and I've been time-shifting to accommodate east coast-based projects I've been working on for my company.

Working from home has many benefits but getting up between 5 AM and 6 AM can still be painful, even if all I have to do is throw on jeans and walk downstairs to my office. But I've noticed the more I condition myself for this new schedule, the more I like it.

How much I like my time-shifted schedule came into sharp focus yesterday when I flew out to Boston to be with my project team to prepare new designs for our client presentation today. When I'm in Los Angeles, I'm used to having my work done by around 3 PM. It's obvious too - my email and instant message programs go silent. It's a great feeling.

Under these 'normal' hours today in Boston, I still had work to finish at 6 PM last night.

I'm looking forward to going back to my 'normal' schedule.

Home Work, a new podcast from 70 Decibels about just that.

via Shawn Blanc

NYTimes: Hello, Cruel World

17% of our sample of Drew University's Class of 2011 is unemployed. 39% have full-time jobs, including six who have both full- and part-time jobs. 35% of students who are employed part time have two or more jobs. 74% of students who are interning are unpaid. 22% of students are in graduate school. 34% of jobs involve food service, retail, customer service, clerical or unskilled work.

It's a much different world than the one I graduated into back in 1999.

Sound, yet often ignored advice from Patrick Rhone:

I'm a writer. I have everything I need, right now, to write. Take away my computer? I'll still write. I'll use pen and paper. Take away my pen and paper, and I'll use my fingernail to scrawl it into the soft bark of the nearest tree.

Extreme? Perhaps. But I can tell you for certain that, when it is time to write, nothing will stop me from doing so.

via The Next Web

My brother Mark has great nuggets of culture and imagery over at his site, Twurts & Geekery.

I especially liked this quote he dug up:

I find it quite fucked up that the most outlandish thoughts can pay for your existence. The most bizarre thoughts you may have had in 1994 on an Ecstasy tab can turn into money, which turns into houses, which turns into cat food. It's the Yukon in our brain, it's a gold rush, it's all sitting there, and it's worth money.

-Grant Morrison, comic book writer

Wishingful Thinking gives us 10 Ways the Workplace Crushes Creativity.

One study found that office distractions eat an average 2.1 hours a day. Another study, published in October 2005, found that employees spent an average of 11 minutes on a project before being distracted. After an interruption it takes them 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they do at all. People switch activities every three minutes, either making a call, speaking with someone in their cubicle, or working on a document.

Distractions are not just frustrating; they can be exhausting. By the time you get back to where you were, your ability to stay focused goes down even further as you have even less glucose available now. Change focus ten times an hour (one study showed people in offices did so as much as 20 times an hour), and your productive thinking time is only a fraction of what's possible.

When I read this, my immediate thought was all the external distractions I get (managers, clients), but there's just as many, if not more, self-imposed distractions to get rid of.

Checking Facebook, checking RSS feeds, checking Twitter, seeing if anyone new and cool is on Google Plus, responding to instant messages - these are all potential distractions (not everyone finds them irresistible to check) we have the ability to remove.

David, from 37Signals, talks about motivation:

When you're not working on something you're inspired by, your efficiency is so much lower. You find more moments in the day to let yourself be distracted by email or reading on the Web or something else. That's usually the key smell I detect when I'm working on something I don't really want to be working on: I check email much more frequently and I engage in chats about things that aren't related to what I should be working on.

You could hate on the 37Signals dudes with all their inspirational talk and books, but they run a profitable company based on their beliefs.

They walk the walk.

(I was going to say they eat their own dogfood, but that's such a negative analogy)

This post by Seth Godin struck a nerve with me and I was compelled to frame it up as a bigger image for emphasis.

Business Insider: Why Successful People Leave Work Early

Try this for a day: don't answer every phone call. Stop checking your email every two minutes. And leave work early. You'll be astounded at how much more you'll get done.

According to a study published in the Psychological Review conducted by Dr. K. Anders Ericcson, the key to great success is working harder in short bursts of time. Then give yourself a break before getting back to work.

The trick is staying focused. Ericsson and his team evaluated a group of musicians to find out what the "excellent" players were doing differently. They found that violinists who practiced more deliberately, say for 4 hours, accomplished more than others who slaved away for 7 hours. The best performers set goals for their practice sessions and required themselves to take breaks.

via @Richard_Florida