Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret

We do this at Xamarin. Every employee sends an email to the entire company first thing Monday morning, containing their A&Os (Achievements and Objectives).

We're a very distributed team and A&Os are one of the ways we keep everyone in touch.

Also, doing this Monday morning is pretty important -- it means people focus on planning the upcoming week, instead of just summarizing the week that ended. Having a time every week where you set goals for yourself, and then communicate them to all your peers, seems to be pretty effective. And one benefit of having these emails go out to the whole company is that everyone can read them and comment on what people are planning, before the work starts.

I've always found this (daily update w/ tomorrow's plans) to be a great way to work as a contractor as well. You demonstrate that you're productive (usually much more so than employees) and future planning helps you uncover additional work to pitch to your client.

The process of self-reflection multiplies my own motivation.

I noticed a big change in the way I work and how successful I feel after I started keeping a daily journal. My focus was not directly on productivity, but I wanted to see where my time had been going on the days where I have multi-hour lapses which seem to produce nothing.

On a typical day, I type 500 words to describe the 2 or 3 most significant moments / insights which happened that day. I also note ideas, people I meet, and more mundane things (ex. how much sleep I got) in less detail.

I write mine in the iPhone Notes app since it's already with me all the time. (I'm now designing an app which will extend the concept a step further to aggregate some of this info in more useful ways without sacrificing the convenience of one big text area for input.)

Kinda undermines the article then.

I mentioned that, at my last company, we sent weekly status reports with items completed and expected upcoming tasks. I was promptly told that status reports were a sign of a broken company. Apparently, if I'd called them snippets instead, I'd have been applauded for mentioning an innovative business tool?

The thing which is always overlooked in articles like this is guidance and feedback. Sending "snippets" or status reports into a black hole leads to engineers feeling isolated and disinterested (on all but the most core projects). Failing to manage engineers and set clear goals is simply poor communication.