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I let a stranger watch me work for a day and I've never been more productive

melmagazine.com

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Re: I let a stranger watch me work for a day and I've never been more productive

#171

Post by jakebaker »

Svoka wrote: post #24

Legends say that long ago outside of the bubble where people working constantly monitoring each others and there even was people who's position was literally supervisors. This is called "office". Somehow absolute peak of my procrastination happened in those human filled dedicated work places with supervision, from bosses, peers and subordinates.

Eh, it’s less about monitoring and more about shared effort and focus. Take what works, leave the rest. For a lot of us, this is a life saving and wonderful service.

Re: I let a stranger watch me work for a day and I've never been more productive

#172

Post by jakebaker »

Mirioron wrote: post #4

That's interesting and I have no doubt it works. However, I think that you might simply get used to the pressure and start procrastinating either on the service itself or simply procrastinating using in the service. The other problem is that any kind of outside force that pushes you to work harder also creates stress. This stress isn't entirely regulated by yourself and it's possible for it to backfire.

It’s about making it a bit easier to get into the groove. If you’re determined not to work, you’ll find ways around it. P

Re: I let a stranger watch me work for a day and I've never been more productive

#174

Post by jakebaker »

telesilla wrote: post #90

I'm a member of a private online pomodoro group, every 30 minutes or so the bell dings and we all chat, if we want, for a few minutes then get back to work. Those who want to show their cam do, but mostly we don't and we tend to talk about the tasks we are doing and how it's going. It's informal and geared towards independence but with enough communication that I don't feel I'm isolated. I think it's a much better ba…

Culture and intent matters a lot. If it’s an enforcement/punishment thing, it’s garbage. If it’s a shared and collaborative thing to get more out of life, it’s a great thing.

Re: I let a stranger watch me work for a day and I've never been more productive

#175

Post by suppressingfire »

mwfunk wrote: post #81

I don't doubt it in the short term, but I fear these are the sorts of articles that give people one more reason to want to stick their employees in open offices. The usual excuses presented to employees are handwavey things like "collaboration" and "teamwork", but the excuses presented to other managers can also involve things like "employees are more likely to feel self-conscious from visibility, and less likely to…

To be fair, I see plenty of folks in open office settings that DGAF about that and looks at memes or YouTube or Reddit on 30" monitors visible to any passers by.

Re: I let a stranger watch me work for a day and I've never been more productive

#176

Post by pyman »

Focusmate has nothing to do with pair programming. It's used by people who work remotely and don't have the benefits of working in an open plan environment.

The problem lies in how focusmate and pair programming are implemented.

Inexperienced dev managers, who have little or none knowledge of XP, use these techniques to micro-manage developers, making their life's miserable.

Re: I let a stranger watch me work for a day and I've never been more productive

#178

Post by loco5niner »

whymauri wrote: post #86
arminiusreturns wrote: post #82

I hate this trend in management so much. I'm a combat vet with ptsd, and I've noticed companies more and more trying to do stupid open office layouts to save money and achieve this same result, but there are those of us it majorly negatively impacts our productivity in the medium to long term. Add on top that now instead of being able to think about a problem deeply, I get interrupted every 3 minutes by some adhoc qu…

Does your company not have productivity rooms/spaces? I've found that to be the happy middle between completely open and closed-office for me. Though I do agree I was significantly more productive at companies where I had my own office/shared with only one other person.

My open office does not. I would love to be able to book one of those for an afternoon on a regular basis.
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